Part 12

'While we were in this irresolute dilemma, we thought we saw a light, that glimmered for a moment, and as suddenly disappeared. We watched, I know not how long, and again saw it twinkle, though, as we thought, in something of a different direction. Clarke said it was a will-o'the-wisp. I replied it might be one, but as it seemed the only chance we had, my advice was to continue our walk in that direction; in hopes that if it were a light proceeding from any house or village, it would become more visible as we approached. We walked on, I know not how far, and then paused; but discovered no more of the light. We walked on again; again stood still, and looked on every side of us, either for the light or any other object; but we could see nothing distinctly. The obscure forms around us had varied their appearance; and whether they were hills, or clouds, or what they were, we could not possibly discover; though the first we still thought was the most probable. By this time we had no certain recollection of which way we had come, or to what point we were directing our course. We were continually in doubt; now pausing, now conjecturing, now proceeding. We continued to wander, we knew not whither. Sometimes it appeared we went up hill, and sometimes down. We had stepped very cautiously, and therefore very slowly; had warned each other continually to be careful; and had not dared to take twenty steps at a time, without mutually enquiring to know if all were safe. We continued, environed as it were by the objects which most powerfully inspire fear; by the darkness of night, the tumult of the elements, the utter ignorance of where we were or by what objects surrounded, and the dejectedness which our situation inspired. Thieves and assassins might be at our back, and we could not hear them; gulfs, rocks, or rivers, in our front, or on either side, and we could not see them. The next step might plunge us, headlong, we knew not whither.

'These fears were not all imaginary. Finding the ground very uneven on a sudden, and stumbling dangerously myself, I stood still. I did not hear my companion! I called--I received no answer! I repeated, in a louder tone, 'CLARKE! where are you?' Still no answer! I then shouted, with all the fear that I felt, and heard a faint response, that seemed to be beneath me, and at a prodigious distance. It terrified, yet it relieved. We had spoken not three minutes before. I stood silent, in hopes he would speak again; but my fears were too violent to remain so long. I once more called; and he replied, with rather a louder voice, which lessened the apparent distance, 'Take care! You'll dash yourself to pieces!'

Reader, isn't this very graphic description? Yet what could be more straight-forward and simple? But to proceed: TREVOR ascertains from his companion that he is not seriously injured, and avows his own determination at once to get to him; but the other exclaims: 'For GOD in heaven's sake don't! I suppose I am in a chalk-pit, or at the bottom of a steep crag.' TREVOR however proceeds to crawl on his hands and knees in the direction of his voice, determined if possible to reach him:

'I FOUND the rough impediments around me increase; till presently I came to one that was ruder than the rest. I crawled upon it, sustained by my knees and right hand, and stretching forward with my left. I groped, but felt nothing. I cautiously laid my belly to the ground and stretched out my other arm. Still it was vacancy. I stretched a little more violently; feeling forward and on each side; and I seemed to be projected upon a point, my head and shoulders inclining over a dark abyss, which the imagination left unfathomable. I own I felt terror; and the sensation certainly was not lessened, when, making an attempt to recover my position and go back, my support began to give way. My effort to retreat was as violent as my terror; but it was too late. The ground shook, loosened, and, with the struggle I made carrying me with it, toppled headlong down. What the height that I fell was, I have no means of ascertaining; for the heath on which we were wandering abounds with quarries and precipices; but either it was in fact, or my fears made it, prodigious.

Recovering from the violent shock of his fall, he replies to the vehement questions of his companion, who had heard his perilous descent. After mutual inquiries, it is found that both are on their legs, and that although violently wrenched, no bones are broken. But where _were_ they? and how were they to discover their whereabout? Perhaps in a stone-quarry, or lime-pit; perhaps at the edge of waters. It might be, too, that they had fallen down only on the first bank or ridge of a quarry, and had a precipice ten-fold more dreadful before them:

'WHILE we were conjecturing, the stroke of a large clock, brought whizzing in the wind, struck full upon our ear. We listened with the most anxious ardor. The next stroke was very, very faint; a different current had carried it a different way; and with all our eager attention, we could not be certain that we heard any more. Yet, though we had lost much time, and our progress had been excessively tedious, it could not be two o'clock in the morning. It might indeed very probably be twelve. The first stroke of the clock made us conjecture it came from some steeple, or hall tower, at no very great distance. The second carried our imaginations we knew not whither. We had not yet recovered courage enough to take more steps than were necessary to come to each other; and while we were considering, during an intermitting pause of the roaring of the wind, we distinctly heard a cur yelp. Encouraged by this, we immediately hallooed with all our might. The wind again began to chafe, and swell, and seemed to mock at our distress. Still we repeated our efforts, whenever the wind paused; but, instead of voices intending to answer our calls, we heard shrill whistlings, which certainly were produced by men. Could it be by good men? By any but night marauders; intent on mischief, but disturbed and alarmed? They were signals indubitably: for we shouted again, they were again given, and were then repeated from another quarter; at least if they were not, they were miraculously imitated, by the dying away of the wind. In a little while we again heard the cur yelp; and immediately afterward a howling, which was so mingled with the blast that we could not tell whether it were the wind itself, the yelling of a dog, or the agonizing cries of a human voice; but it was a dreadfully dismal sound. We listened with perturbed and deep attention; and it was several times repeated, with increasing uncertainty, confusion, and terror.

'What was to be done? My patience was exhausted. Danger itself could no longer detain me; and I told CLARKE I was determined to make toward the village, or whatever the place was, from whence, dangerous and doubtful as they were, these various sounds proceeded. Finding me resolute, he was very earnest to have led the way; and when I would not permit him, he grasped me by the hand, and told me that if there were pitfalls and gulfs, and if I did go down, unless he should have strength enough to save me, we would go down together.'

Cautiously and slowly, step by step, they pursue their way, alternately catching and losing a dancing light in the distance, which they imagine to proceed from some mansion, apparently a large one, which they at length reach, only to find it dark, still, and closed. Searching on the outside, however, they come to a large open gate, which they enter, and after feeling their way for a short distance, arrive at a door that evidently belongs to an out-house or detached building. It is shut, but the key has been inadvertently left in the lock. Fatigued, shelterless, and bruised, they have little hesitation in profiting by the accident. A noisome effluvia assails them on entering, which at first almost drives them back; but growing less the longer they continue, they accept the shelter, and grope their way behind some barrels and lumber, where they find straw, upon which they rest their drenched and weary limbs. They are scarcely nestled together, before they again hear the yelping of a cur, and the same dismal howls and shrill whistling signals, by which their imaginations had previously been wrought up; together with the voices of men, in coarse, rude and savage words, denoting anger and anxiety for the perpetration of some dark purpose, in keeping with the fierce and threatening sounds: 'They approached. One of them had a lantern. He came up to the door; and finding it open, boisterously shut it; with a broad and bitter curse against the carelessness of some man, whose name he pronounced, for leaving it open; and eternally damning others for being so long in doing their business. We were now locked in; and we soon heard no more of the voices.' In spite of these alarms, however, fear at length gives place to fatigue; but their rest is of short duration. TREVOR'S brief slumber is disturbed by his companion, whom he finds 'shaking in the most violent agitation he ever beheld in any human being,' and who only replies with a groan to his question of 'What is the matter?' Awakened from his own wild slumbers, and strongly partaking of his companion's sensations, TREVOR yet endeavors to rouse him to speech and recollection, by asking again: 'What have you heard?--what ails you?' 'It was some time before he could utter an articulate sound. At last, shaking more violently as he spoke, and with inexpressible horror in his voice, he gasping said: '_A dead hand!_' 'Where?' 'I felt it--I had hold of it--it is now at my neck!' TREVOR, trembling in sympathy with his companion, hardly dares to stretch out his arm to examine. At length he ventures: 'Never shall I forget the sensation I experienced, when to my full conviction I actually felt a cold, dead hand between my fingers! I was suffocated with horror! I struggled to overcome it, but it again seized me, and I sank half entranced!' At this instant the shrill sound of the whistle rings piercing through the dismal place in which they are confined. It is answered; and the same hoarse voices are once more heard. The prisoners lie silent, not daring to breathe, when they hear the door unlock; and with a dialogue of mingled oaths and reproaches, at the want of care in leaving the door unlocked, and the prospect of being 'smoked' and 'blown,' two men enter with a lantern, bearing a sack, one of whom exclaims: 'Lift the sack on end! Why the h--ll don't you lend a hand and keep it steady, while I untie it? Do you think a dead man can stand on his legs?' After much colloquy of this sort, the men quit the place, leaving the two travellers not only with the dead body, but with bones and human skeletons, revealed by the light of the lantern, on every side! The dancing lights they had seen, the shrill signals, and the dreadful howls they had heard, are no longer mysterious. It was no _ignis fatuus_, but the lantern of those assassins; no dog or wolf baying the moon, but the agonizing yells of murder! After the departure of the desperadoes, they hear various noises in the adjoining house; among others, the occasional ringing of a chamber-bell. Soon other sounds approach more nearly; and presently the inner door once more opens, and a livery servant, bearing two lighted candles, comes in, followed by a man with an apron tied round him, having a kind of bib up to his chin, and linen sleeves drawn over his coat. The master (for such he evidently is) has a meagre, wan countenance; and the servant seems in great trepidation; to whom the gentleman observes: 'Don't be afraid, MATTHEW; you will soon be accustomed to it, and you will then laugh at your present timidity. Unless you conquer your fears, you will not be able to obey my directions in assisting me; consequently, you will not be fit for your place; and you know you cannot get so good wages in any other.' To all this the prisoners are not inattentive listeners; and as the servant turns round, he beholds TREVOR standing with his eyes fixed, watchful for the interpretation of these enigmas. The man stares, gasps, turns pale, and at last drops down, overcome with terror; while the master, whose attention is thus directed to the apparition of TREVOR, stands motionless, his face assuming a death-like hue, and the power of utterance apparently lost. This incident hastens the _éclaircissement_. In their benighted wanderings, they had at last found a refuge in the _dissecting-room of an anatomist_, who had risen before day to operate upon the subject which had been secured for him in the course of the night by the desperadoes before mentioned.

The picture, it will be perceived, was reflected through the medium of consternation and terror. The imaginations of the travellers had been strongly preyed upon by their distress, by the accident of falling, and by the mingled noises they had heard; proceeding from the church-yard robbers, the village dogs disturbed by them, and the whistling, roaring, and howling so common to high gusts of wind; all which was sufficient to distract minds already in a state of visionary deception and alarm. Being engaged in a desperate deed, for selfish purposes, the 'body-snatchers' had the _manners_ of murderers, which the more effectually deceived the terrified travellers. Add to this the spectacle of a dissecting-room; here preparations of arms, pendent in rows, with the vessels injected; and there legs, feet, and other limbs; and a satisfactory _catalogue raisonné_ will have been established. For the rest, the anatomist subsequently explains to his unexpected auditors, that finding his health such as to compel him to forego the winter lectures of able surgeons in London, he had continued his practical studies in the country, by the means which they had discovered, and the necessity of procuring which he defended, on the ground that a surgeon _must_ be acquainted with the direction, site, and properties of the muscles, arteries, ligaments, nerves, and other parts, before he can cut the living body with the least possible injury; and that a dead body, being no longer subject to pain, could no more be disgraced by the knife of a surgeon than by the gnawing of the worm. Rather specious reasoning, it strikes us; at least an argument not likely to be particularly convincing to surviving relatives and friends. HOOD'S soliloquy of an exhumed 'subject' comes also in aid of the other side of the question:

'I thought the last of all my cares Would end with my last minute; But though I went to my long home, I didn't stay long in it.

'The body-snatchers they have come, And made a snatch at me; It's very hard them kind of men Won't let a body be!'

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GOSSIP WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS.--We must beg leave to say, once for all, and _to_ all, that we cannot permit this Magazine to be made the medium of theological controversy. Several pamphlets, letters, tracts, etc., have been sent us for examination, connected with '_Puseyism and Anti-Puseyism_;' themes also which give the title to a long communication before us, from some one who seems, in 'cramming' for his article, to have gone through a course of the fathers; poured over the canonists, and searched all the schoolmen; for he brings forward a very formidable array of authorities to prove something or other, yet _what_, we cannot justly make out. But if the case be not quite clear, then have TERTULLIAN, CHRYSOSTOM, AUSTIN, JEROME, and the rest, been summoned in vain; in vain the citations from famous high churchmen; archbishops, bishops, deans, and doctors; from WHITGIFT to WATERLAND, from ROGERS to RUTHERFORTH, 'marshalled in dread array, a host invincible.' Then again we have '_A Dialogue between a Puseyite and an Anti-Puseyite_,' which we came near sending to an esteemed friend and correspondent, as an illustration of a recent comment of his upon this species of antagonism; a dialogue in which one speaker does all the talking; here ingeniously sinking a truth, and there raising a swelling fiction, and all with such an air of fairness, and 'triumph through the right!' 'Have you not been amused sometimes,' says our friend, 'to see a reverend disputant set up a little man of straw on the opposite side, and making him support positions he would never take, by arguments he would never use, trip him up with an adroit catch, or knock him down with an annihilating blow; and continue this diverting process of setting up and knocking down, till all sensible people were convinced that he was a mighty cudgeller as well as a sound believer, and his opponent a fool as well as a heretic?' But, 'something too much of this.' We took up our pen merely to say, that while we reverence that true religion which is 'first _pure_, then _peaceable_,' we hold in no respect sectarian quarrels, and especially the 'family cat-fights' in which the _Puseyites_ and their opponents are at present so vindictively engaged. Of all employments, quarrelling about religion is the worst; and he that _does_ quarrel about it, can have none worth quarrelling about, in our humble opinion. 'The man who committed the fatal presumption of first saying to his fellow man, 'You shall think as I do,' is responsible for by far the greater part of all the wretchedness and injustice of this world.'... WE shall not invite the reader's attention to '_The Innocence of a Galley-Slave_,' the first of two parts of which will be found in preceding pages, simply because it requires no such incentive to perusal. But we cannot forego the satisfaction of assuring the translator that so long as we have been connected with this Magazine, we have never read _any thing_ that impressed itself so forcibly upon our imagination. The faithful yet most dramatic portraiture of character; the deep interest excited by the incidents of the story, which proceed by a natural convergence to the _dénouement_; the felicitous management of the dialogue, and the grouping of the scenes and _dramatis personæ_, have never been equalled, to our conception, by any previous writer in the KNICKERBOCKER. Being what is termed 'an old stager,' in a literary sense, we are not wont to be deeply affected by narratives of this sort; but we are bound to state, that after reading 'The Galley-Slave' at night, we retired to rest, but not to sleep. Its scenes, its characters, were before us during the night-watches, and until the morning dawned; with such variations only as were produced by the vagaries of half-waking dreams. If there be a reader of the KNICKERBOCKER who shall disagree with us in opinion, after the perusal of the conclusion of the story in our October number, why we should like to see him--'some day when he is passing.' * * * THE following was found upon the body of a suicide, taken from the Thames in London. It was well pronounced 'an act of attainder against the whole community, in the infamy of which each man of means had his share. It is irresistible in its truth and pathos:

'THIS body, if ever this body should be found, was once a thing which moved about the earth, despised and unnoticed, and died indigent and unlamented. It could hear, see, feel, smell, and taste, with as much quickness, delicacy, and force as other bodies. It had desires and passions like other bodies, but was denied the use of them by such as had the power and the will to engross the good things of this world to themselves. The doors of the great were shut upon it; not because it was infected with disease or contaminated with infamy, but on account of the fashion of the garments with which it was clothed, and the name it derived from its forefathers; and because it had not the habit of bending its knee where its heart owed no respect, nor the power of moving its tongue to gloze the crimes or flatter the follies of men. It was excluded the fellowship of such as heap up gold and silver; not because it did, but for fear it might, ask a small portion of their beloved wealth. It shrunk with pain and pity from the haunts of ignorance which the knowledge it possessed could not enlighten, and guilt that its sensations were obliged to abhor. There was but one class of men with whom it was permitted to associate, and those were such as had feelings and misfortunes like its own; among whom it was its hard fate frequently to suffer imposition, from assumed worth and fictitious distress. Beings of supposed benevolence, capable of perceiving, loving, and promoting merit and virtue, have now and then seemed to flit and glide before it. But the visions were deceitful. Ere they were distinctly seen, the phantoms vanished. Or, if such beings do exist, it has experienced the peculiar hardship of never having met with any, in whom both the purpose and the power were fully united. Therefore, with hands wearied with labor, eyes dim with watchfulness, veins but half nourished, and a mind at length subdued by intense study and a reiteration of unaccomplished hopes, it was driven by irresistible impulse to end at once such a complication of evils.'

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