Brander Matthews

“ Then Cosmo Waynflete was wide-awake again; and he knew where he was once more—not in Japan, not in Persia, not in Lisbon, not in Sleepy Hollow, but here in New York, in his own room, before his own fire. He opened the door at once and admitted his friend, Paul Stuyvesant.
"It isn't dinner-time, is it?" he asked. "I'm not late, am I? The fact is, I've been asleep."
"It is so good of you to confess that," his friend answered, laughing; "although the length of time you kept me waiting and ringing might have led me to suspect it. No, you are not late and it is not dinner-time. ”

“ Paul Stuyvesant looked at Cosmo Waynflete for nearly a minute without reply. Then all the answer he made was to say: "That's a queer dressing-gown you have on."
"It is time I took it off," said the other, as he twisted himself out of its clinging folds. "It is a beautiful specimen of weaving, isn't it? I call it the dream-gown of the Japanese ambassador, for although I bought it in a curiosity-shop in Nuremberg, it was once, I really believe, the slumber-robe of an Oriental envoy." ”

“ So he told her all about it, and how whenever he went to Salem the two ghosts interfered, and gave dark séances and manifested and materialized and made the place absolutely impossible. Kitty listened in silence, and Eliphalet thought she had changed her mind. But she hadn't done anything of the kind."
"Just like a man—to think she was going to," remarked Baby Van Rensselaer.
"She just told him she could not bear ghosts herself, but she would not marry a man who was afraid of them."
"Just like a girl—to be so inconsistent," remarked Dear Jones. ”

“ The afternoon was drawing on, and in New York the sun sets early on Christmas day. The red rays shot into the window almost horizontally, and they filled the crystal globe with a curious light. Cosmo Waynflete lay back in his easy-chair, with his Japanese robe about him, and gazed intently at the beautiful ball which seemed like a bubble of air and water. His mind went back to the afternoon in April, two years before, when he had found that crystal sphere in a Japanese shop within sight of the incomparable Fugiyama. ”

“ Not only this, but thereafter he seemed to have transferred his personality to the Cosmo Waynflete who was a Japanese samurai and to have abandoned entirely the Cosmo Waynflete who was an American traveller, and who had just returned to New York that Christmas morning. So completely did the Japanese identity dominate that the existence of the American identity was wholly unknown to him. It was as though the American had gone to sleep in New York at the end of the nineteenth century, and had waked a Japanese in Nippon in the beginning of the eighteenth century. ”

“ One day while I was wondering how we could best catch the man who was getting at the books, that clock happened to strike, and somehow it reminded me that in our photographic society at college we had once suggested that it would be amusing to attach a detective camera to a timepiece and take snapshots every few minutes all through the day. I saw that this clock of ours faced the safe, and that it couldn't be better placed for the purpose. ”

“ And on Sunday it kept watch for us here, winking every ten minutes. From eight o'clock in the morning to three in the afternoon it winked forty-two times, and all it saw was the same scene, the empty corner of the room here, with the safe in the shadow at first and at last in the full light that poured down from the glass roof over us. But a little after three a man came into the office and made ready to open the safe. At ten minutes past three the clock and the camera took his photograph—in the twinkling of an eye. ”

“ Apparently this beautiful robe was intended to serve as a dressing-gown, and as such Cosmo Waynflete utilized it immediately. The ample folds fell softly about him, and the rich silk itself seemed to be soothing to his limbs, so delicate was its fibre and so carefully had it been woven. Around the full skirt there was embroidery of threads of gold, and again on the open and flowing sleeves. ”

“ Eliphalet Duncan went to the White Mountains, and in the car of the railroad that runs to the top of Mount Washington he met a classmate whom he had not seen for years, and this classmate introduced Duncan to his sister, and this sister was a remarkably pretty girl, and Duncan fell in love with her at first sight, and by the time he got to the top of Mount Washington he was so deep in love that he began to consider his own unworthiness, and to wonder whether she might ever be induced to care for him a little—ever so little. ”

“ All through the four years that followed the firing on the flag in 1861 the Ramapo Works had been run day and night. When peace came at last and the people had leisure to expand, a large share of the rails needed by the new overland roads which were to bind the East and West together in iron bonds had been rolled by Whittier, Wheatcroft & Co. Of late years, as Paul knew, the old firm seemed to have lost some of its early energy, and, having young and vigorous competitors, it had barely held its own. ”

“ Eliphalet Hitchcock who was foremost in the time of the Salem witchcraft craze. And this little old house which she left to my friend Eliphalet Duncan was haunted."
"By the ghost of one of the witches, of course?" interrupted Dear Jones.
"Now how could it be the ghost of a witch, since the witches were all burned at the stake? You never heard of anybody who was burned having a ghost, did you?" asked Uncle Larry.
"That's an argument in favor of cremation, at any rate," replied Dear Jones, evading the direct question.
"It is, if you don't like ghosts. I do," said Baby Van Rensselaer. ”

“ I did not know what to say in answer to this, and so I said nothing.
"What would you say to me," he went on—and now it seemed to me that his smile suggested rather pitying condescension than kindly toleration—"what would you say to me, if I were to tell you that I myself have seen all the many visions unrolled before you in these instruments? What would you say, if I declared that I had gazed on the dances of Salome and of Esmeralda? that I had beheld the combat of Achilles and Hector and the mounted fight of Saladin and the Knight of the Leopard?"
"You are not Time himself?" ”

“ Wheatcroft accused me, I confessed at last, thinking you might be easier on me than you would be on the boy."
"My poor friend," said Mr. Whittier, sympathetically, holding out his hand, which the Major clasped gratefully for a moment.
"Now that we know who was selling us to the Tuxedo people, we can protect ourselves hereafter," declared Mr. Wheatcroft. "And in spite of your trying to humbug me into believing you guilty, Major, I'm willing to let your son off easy."
"I think I can get him a place where he will be out of temptation, because he will be kept hard at work always," said Paul. ”

“ And, oddly enough, he now discovered himself to be astride a bony steed. He could not say what manner of horse it was he was riding, but he felt sure that it was not the faithful charger that had saved his life in Persia, once upon a time, in days long gone by, as it seemed to him then. He was not in Persia now—of that he was certain, nor in Japan, nor in the Iberian peninsula. Where he was he did not know.
In the dead hush of midnight he could hear the barking of a dog on the opposite shore of a dusky and indistinct waste of waters that spread itself far below him. ”

“ At last, so it seemed to him, he had come into a land of peace and quiet, where there was rest and comfort and where no man need go in fear of his life. It was a country where vengeance was not a duty and where midnight combats were not a custom he found himself smiling as he thought that a grisly dragon and a goblin rider would be equally out of place in this laughing landscape. ”

“ And what differentiates our spook—spiritus Americanus—from the ordinary ghost of literature is that it responds to the American sense of humor. Take Irving's stories, for example. The 'Headless Horseman'—that's a comic ghost story. And Rip Van Winkle—consider what humor, and what good humor, there is in the telling of his meeting with the goblin crew of Hendrik Hudson's men! A still better example of this American way of dealing with legend and mystery is the marvellous tale of the rival ghosts."
"The rival ghosts!" queried the Duchess and Baby Van Rensselaer together. ”

“ He began to have a growing consciousness of impending evil. Before he had taken ten strokes—and he was a swift oarsman—he was aware of a mysterious presence between him and Miss Sutton."
"Was it the guardian-angel ghost warning him off the match?" interrupted Dear Jones.
"That's just what it was," said Uncle Larry. "And he yielded to it, and kept his peace, and rowed Miss Sutton back to the hotel with his proposal unspoken."
"More fool he," said Dear Jones. "It will take more than one ghost to keep me from proposing when my mind is made up." ”

“ To gaze upon dancing was not what I had gone forth to do, but I saw no reason why I should not do so, as I was thus strangely bidden. I lowered my head until my eyes were close to the two openings at the top of the stand. I looked into blackness at first, and yet I thought that I could detect a mystic commotion of the invisible particles at which I was staring. I made no doubt that, if I waited, in due season the promise would be fulfilled. After a period of expectancy which I could not measure, infinitesimal sparks darted hither and thither, and there was a slight crackling sound. ”

“ He was startled as he recalled the extraordinary series of adventures which had fallen to his lot since he had fixed his gaze on the crystal ball. It seemed to him as though he had been whirled through space and through time.
"I suppose every man is always the hero of his own dreams," he began, doubtfully.
"Of course," his friend returned; "in sleep our natural and healthy egotism is absolutely unrestrained. ”

“ I'd make it hot for him!"
"You would like to have him out at the Ramapo Works," said Paul, smiling at the little man's violence, "and put him under the steam-hammer?"
"Yes, I would," responded Mr. Wheatcroft. "I would indeed! Putting a man under a steam-hammer may seem a cruel punishment, but I think it would cure the fellow of any taste for prying into our business in the future."
"I think it would get him out of the habit of living," the elder Whittier said, as the tall clock in the corner struck one. "But don't let's be so brutal. Let's go to lunch and talk the matter over quietly. ”

“ That the Ramapo Works should once more take the lead was Paul Whittier's solemn purpose, and to this end he had been carefully trained. He was now a young man of twenty-five, a tall, handsome fellow, with a full mustache over his firm mouth, and with clear, quick eyes below his curly brown hair. He had spent four years in college, carrying off honors in mathematics, was popular with his classmates, who made him class poet, and in his senior year he was elected president of the college photographic society. ”

“ After luncheon, as it happened, both the senior and the junior partner of Whittier, Wheatcroft & Co. had to attend meetings, and they went their several ways, leaving Paul to return to the office alone.
When he came opposite to the house which bore the weather-beaten sign of the firm he stood still for a moment, and looked across with mingled pride and affection. The building was old-fashioned—so old-fashioned, indeed, that only a long-established firm could afford to occupy it. It was Paul Whittier's great-grandfather who had founded the Ramapo Works. ”