No More Learning

At length, one evening, some three or four days after the occurrence, we
were sitting together in the room in which I had seen the apparition--I
occupying the same seat at the same window, and he lounging on a sofa
near at hand. The association of the place and time impelled me to
give him an account of the phenomenon. He heard me to the end--at first
laughed heartily--and then lapsed into an excessively grave demeanor, as
if my insanity was a thing beyond suspicion. At this instant I again
had a distinct view of the monster--to which, with a shout of absolute
terror, I now directed his attention. He looked eagerly--but maintained
that he saw nothing--although I designated minutely the course of the
creature, as it made its way down the naked face of the hill.

I was now immeasurably alarmed, for I considered the vision either as an
omen of my death, or, worse, as the fore-runner of an attack of mania. I
threw myself passionately back in my chair, and for some moments buried
my face in my hands. When I uncovered my eyes, the apparition was no
longer apparent.

My host, however, had in some degree resumed the calmness of his
demeanor, and questioned me very rigorously in respect to the
conformation of the visionary creature. When I had fully satisfied
him on this head, he sighed deeply, as if relieved of some intolerable
burden, and went on to talk, with what I thought a cruel calmness, of
various points of speculative philosophy, which had heretofore formed
subject of discussion between us. I remember his insisting very
especially (among other things) upon the idea that the principle
source of error in all human investigations lay in the liability of
the understanding to under-rate or to over-value the importance of an
object, through mere mis-admeasurement of its propinquity. "To estimate
properly, for example," he said, "the influence to be exercised on
mankind at large by the thorough diffusion of Democracy, the distance
of the epoch at which such diffusion may possibly be accomplished should
not fail to form an item in the estimate. Yet can you tell me one writer
on the subject of government who has ever thought this particular branch
of the subject worthy of discussion at all? "

He here paused for a moment, stepped to a book-case, and brought forth
one of the ordinary synopses of Natural History. Requesting me then to
exchange seats with him, that he might the better distinguish the fine
print of the volume, he took my armchair at the window, and, opening the
book, resumed his discourse very much in the same tone as before.
"But for your exceeding minuteness," he said, "in describing the
monster, I might never have had it in my power to demonstrate to you
what it was. In the first place, let me read to you a schoolboy
account of the genus Sphinx, of the family Crepuscularia of the order
Lepidoptera, of the class of Insecta--or insects. The account runs thus:

"'Four membranous wings covered with little colored scales of metallic
appearance; mouth forming a rolled proboscis, produced by an elongation
of the jaws, upon the sides of which are found the rudiments of
mandibles and downy palpi; the inferior wings retained to the superior
by a stiff hair; antennae in the form of an elongated club, prismatic;
abdomen pointed, The Death's--headed Sphinx has occasioned much terror
among the vulgar, at times, by the melancholy kind of cry which it
utters, and the insignia of death which it wears upon its corslet. '"

He here closed the book and leaned forward in the chair, placing
himself accurately in the position which I had occupied at the moment of
beholding "the monster. "

"Ah, here it is," he presently exclaimed--"it is reascending the face
of the hill, and a very remarkable looking creature I admit it to be.
Still, it is by no means so large or so distant as you imagined it,--for
the fact is that, as it wriggles its way up this thread, which some
spider has wrought along the window-sash, I find it to be about the
sixteenth of an inch in its extreme length, and also about the sixteenth
of an inch distant from the pupil of my eye. "




HOP-FROG

I never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He seemed
to live only for joking. To tell a good story of the joke kind, and to
tell it well, was the surest road to his favor. Thus it happened that
his seven ministers were all noted for their accomplishments as jokers.
They all took after the king, too, in being large, corpulent, oily men,
as well as inimitable jokers. Whether people grow fat by joking, or
whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke, I
have never been quite able to determine; but certain it is that a lean
joker is a rara avis in terris.

About the refinements, or, as he called them, the 'ghost' of wit, the
king troubled himself very little. He had an especial admiration for
breadth in a jest, and would often put up with length, for the sake
of it. Over-niceties wearied him. He would have preferred Rabelais'
'Gargantua' to the 'Zadig' of Voltaire: and, upon the whole, practical
jokes suited his taste far better than verbal ones.