This eBook was produced by Andrew Heath
and David Widger
There is an instance of the absorbing tyranny of every-day life which musthave struck all such of my readers as have ever experienced one of thoseportents which are so at variance with every-day life, that the ordinaryepithet bestowed on them is "supernatural."
And be my readers few or many, there will be no small proportion of themto whom once, at least, in the course of their existence, a somethingstrange and eerie has occurred,—a something which perplexed and baffledrational conjecture, and struck on those chords which vibrate tosuperstition. It may have been only a dream unaccountably verified,—anundefinable presentiment or forewarning; but up from such slighter andvaguer tokens of the realm of marvel, up to the portents of ghostlyapparitions or haunted chambers, I believe that the greater number ofpersons arrived at middle age, however instructed the class, howevercivilized the land, however sceptical the period, to which they belong,have either in themselves experienced, or heard recorded by intimateassociates whose veracity they accept as indisputable in all ordinarytransactions of life, phenomena which are not to be solved by the wit thatmocks them, nor, perhaps, always and entirely, to the contentment of thereason or the philosophy that explains them away. Such phenomena, I say,are infinitely more numerous than would appear from the instancescurrently quoted and dismissed with a jest; for few of those who havewitnessed them are disposed to own it, and they who only hear of themthrough others, however trustworthy, would not impugn their character forcommon-sense by professing a belief to which common-sense is a mercilesspersecutor. But he who reads my assertion in the quiet of his own room,will perhaps pause, ransack his memory, and find there, in some darkcorner which he excludes from "the babbling and remorseless day," a palerecollection that proves the assertion not untrue.
And it is, I say, an instance of the absorbing tyranny of everyday life,that whenever some such startling incident disturbs its regular tenor ofthought and occupation, that same every-day life hastens to bury in itssands the object which has troubled its surface; the more unaccountable,the more prodigious, has been the phenomenon which has scared andastounded us, the more, with involuntary effort, the mind seeks to riditself of an enigma which might disease the reason that tries to solve it.We go about our mundane business with renewed avidity; we feel thenecessity of proving to ourselves that we are still sober, practical men,and refuse to be unfitted for the world which we know, by unsolicitedvisitations from worlds into which every glimpse is soon lost amidshadows. And it amazes us to think how soon such incidents, though notactually forgotten, though they can be recalled—and recalled too vividlyfor health—at our will, are nevertheless thrust, as it were, out of themind's sight as we cast into lumber-rooms the crutches and splints thatremind us of a broken limb which has recovered its strength and tone. Itis a felicitous peculiarity in our organization, which all members of myprofession will have noticed, how soon, when a bodily pain is once passed,it becomes erased from the recollection,—how soon and how invariably themind refuses to linger over and recall it. No man freed an hour beforefrom a raging toothache, the rack of a neuralgia, seats himself in hisarmchair to recollect and ponder upon the anguish he has undergone. It isthe same with certain afflictions of the mind,—not with those that strikeon our affections, or blast our fortunes, overshadowing our whole futurewith a sense of loss;