Beadle's Dime Library No. 230 — page 16: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Zz! 16 me I must do such and such a lesson, and [ was go much astonished at it in him, that I flashed | up and turned away, ready to cry with morti- fication, to be treated like a baby all of a sudden. Mr. Vanderdecken went up on deck, and I heard him talking to Hassim in Malay, while both of them laughed. And I was sure they were laughing at me. I declare, I felt so mortified that I stamped my foot with anger, and went off to ny state- room, where I cried half the afternoon, Grandpa left me entirely alone, and I couldn’t help thinking that he rather sympathized with the snubbing I had received, for when I came on deck in the evening I found him actually sitting in a great cane chair, smoking a horrid that called a cheroot, and talking to epg rama as if he had known him all e. They didn’t take any notice of me, but went on , and I heard grandpa say: “Yes, sir, Pll own that I do believe in ghaists. I saw a t ship, not three weeks , and she was all fiery, and sailed against and vanished in a puff of smoke, And Ill no deny, sir, that I’ve heard stories about yersel’, for having consort wi’ the powers of the air.” “That is part of my privilege of lineage,” said Mr. Vanderdecken quietly. ‘‘ You know ancestor is still able to visit the earth in le form, and I doubt not that you saw him. have seen him myself,” “Ye bave seen him yersel’, ye say?” asked grandpa, dropping his jaw. ‘Eh, sirs, but a seer is no canny for ither folk.” “T have both seen him, and J can call him to me at my will,” pursued Vanderdecken. ‘“* It grows dusk now, sir; and if you like, I will call up the Flying Dutchman this very night.” Grandpa jumped up like a boy of eighteen, crying: ‘* Eh, sirs, are ye daft, clean daft? What for wad I call him.up, that’s brocht naething but misery to us all, and stolen from me my ain kinsman, the only mon left to stay the house of ‘Bruce? Eh, sirs, dinna think of it. Wad ye drive me daft, mysel’?” He was so much agitated that Mr. Vander- decken got up and had much difficulty in sooth- ing bim, while I confess I was nearly as much frightened myself at the idea of calling up that fearful fiery Phantom that had brought us so ~ much misery. When we had got grandpa quieted down, our host said, more tenderly than ever [ heard him ak: “You say you lost a kinsman by the fiery . ship? Are you quite sure he is dead, Miss ruce?” * How can he beanything else?” said I mourn- fully. “I know if Mungo were alive he would come to find me out, no matter where I was.” «* But what has he to do with the Ghost Ship, [ Daan?’ parsued my host. ‘I don’t under- Then I told him, as well as I could, all our | of trial and suffering, and how the loss of was followed by the coming of the beau- tiful white albatross and our rescue. And when I had finished, he said: ‘Tf your cousin be really dead, or carried off by my ancestor, so that his spirit alone lives, I call him up to you this evening, as soon as | I felt a cold shudder run through my very “ You can call Mungo Johnston up?” [ fal- “T can, if your cor ‘ecture be correct, and he be one of the crew -f the Flying Du‘chman,” said he calmly, ‘‘ You see yonder dark cloud. Bay the word and you shallsee him there. If I cannot call iin, *hen he is not dead, and I have only the powsr te) call spirits.” God guid: u: ¢ r,” ejaculated grandpa, ‘‘do ye tell us op tly y+ re a sorcerer?” Our host ¢ niled .n a strange, mysterious way, re he tec. to tie black cloud he had men- D It vvaj zrowing dark very fast now, and there Was no moon, 4s \uere had been during our ship- wreck. The face of the sky was covered with yt and I saw that it was going to be pitch In one place, behind the vessel, was a dense ck cloud, that looked as if it was bringing ther storm, “Took,” said Mr. Vanderdecken; and the light of the lamp in the binnacle shone on bis face, which was as pale as death, ‘* Yonder comes a cloud big with rain, for we are near the uator; but it will not smite us, Within that _ cloud lurk-the spirits of the dead, Shall I call them forth for you?” _ Grandpa said nothing; but J couldn’t believe nything of the sort; and I remembered what Mr. Denyse had told me; so I answered boldly: -*“ Nonsense, Mr. Vanderdecken, you can’t call up the dead. No one can.” “You think not?’ he said. ‘Tell me whom you wish to see, and he shall come.” “LT ecouldn’t help trembling but 1 choked down the feeling and answered: “Let me see your ancestor then. Not his the Flying Dutchman of 1880. f | ship: I don’t mean that, But let me see your own ancestor, that they call the Flying Dutch- man, in bis own person.” Mr. Vanderdecken said something in Malay in a Joud tone, as if talking to the cloud, and in another moment, as it seemed to me, the bin- nacle lamp went cut. Darkness fell down upon us, and right in the middle of the black cloud, on a sudden, started out an awful HEAD, with its fiery eyes fixed on us menacingly, while the deep murmur of thunder rolled under it. Grandpa uttered a faint groan and fell back in bis chair, I screamed out and hid my face in bis breast, and Vanderdecken remained standing by us, pointing upward. i did not re to look round. That one Ss Ig seemed to have burned itself into my rain, and [ could not banish it. Iheard Vanderdecken’s voice: ‘Look up. It is gone. Fear nothing, but be- ware of daring my powers.” ‘‘ Look up, lassie,” muttered grandpa. ‘‘’Tis gane. Eh, sirs, when’!] we be in Batavia?” I ventured to look up, and the awful HEAD had gone. Grandpa's forehead dripped with sweat, and his face looked haggard; but Vanderdecken was as pale and calm as ever. nd the binnacle lamp, which bad gone out a moment before, showed us all again as plain as ever, I couldn’t help trembling like a leaf as I looked at Vanderdecken. 1 had not noticed it before, but he had been gradually changing his dress since he had been at sea, and now he had adopt- ed the full Malay dress, which suited his dark face and glaring eyes jn dipagt He kept those eyes fixed on us both, as he said, in his deep, rich voice: ‘‘ You have seen that I can call the father of all evil from bis home in the tempest. Now tell me who else you would like to see.” ‘Ob, sir, spare us,” faltered grandpa broken- ly. ‘I'm an auld man, and canna stand muckle, sir. Dinna show us any mair, for the love of God, sir.” He waved his hand indifferently. ‘*As you please. Good-night.” And he vanished from before us so amet 1 | that I thought he must have ab tu throug the deck, while grandpa and I clung together and wished that we were safe on shore again. I know, for my part, I was afraid to go to seep that right, for fear of seeing that awful HEAD again. There was something so diabolically malig- nant in its gleaming eyes; it froze my blood to think of it. And there could be no hocus pocus, as Mr. Denyse called it, about its appearance. ft had suddenly started into view in the depth of a thundercloud, and thunder had followed it, on the open sea, out of sight of land. I had seen it moving up and down, showing that it was alive, and I felt as if I should go raving mad, if it came to me again. I lay awake, starting at every creak of the vessel (and she roaned awfully) till it seemed to me it must be near morning, when at last [ fell asleep, and woke up with a start from a wonderful dream. I thought I was in a lovely tropical island, full of flowers and fruit, and that 1 met my poor dead cousin, Mungo Johnston, who told me that he was a spirit, and had married a sea maiden, And he told me to follow him, and we walked out under the sea intoa great palace of coral, where we heard the most ravishing melodies from the sea maidens. wall at the other side of the cabin, in the midst of which, just as plain as ever I saw anything Johnston, dressed just as he was in the wreck, looking at me. I was so startled I sat up, crying: ‘Oh, my God, Mungo! What do with me? What is it, in God’s name?’ He opened his lips, and I beard him say, in a faint, far-away sort of voice: ‘* Mamie! Mamie! Iliwed you, Mamie !” And then he began to fade away, thinner and thinner, till all of a sudden he vanished, leaving m so frightened that I fell back on my pepe and I must have fainted away dead, for I don’t remember any more till I woke in the morning, with a raging headache, to find the sun shining in my eyes through the stern windows, 1 felt wretched enough, and had no one to tell, for poor grandpa seemed as much shaken as T was. i couldn’t eat anv breakfast, though Inez tried to coax me, and I verily believe I should ou want have gone into brain fever if I hadn’t heard | some one saying, late in the afternoon: “To-morrow we shall be in Batavia, Mr. Bruce; and your terrors will be over, sir.” “God be thanked,” said erence’ voice, “T'm no that thankless as I seem, Maister Van- derdecken; bot I canna help it, sir, The puir bairn’s sick wi’ fright at the speerits, and I’m no muckle the better. I'll no deny ye’ve treated us like a gentleman; but I’ll no be easy till I geton dry land again.” ‘Theard Mr. Vanderdecken say, kindly; ‘‘m sorry the poor child was so much affect- have a big practice among rich | science, was that I woke up, to hear the sweet music | still ening, and see a bright light on the | e ed by my experiment; but I will make amends for itin Java. You must, as soon as you have accomplished your business in Batavia, visit me at my home in the Raj of Samarang. There are some interesting ruins there 1 must show ou. ‘‘T’ll come wi’ pleasure,” said grandpa gon / 9 ‘*T fear naught on land, sir, but on the sea, own J—” And then their voices died away, and I fell asleep from exbaustion and fever. I woke up again, in the middle of the night, to see the same vision, and hear the same voice, saying: ‘Mamie! Mamie! I loved you, Mamie!” That was too much. * * * x * n I am writing this now, after a three months’ fever, in Batavia. MARY BRUCE. —_— 0—— PART III, DOCTOR SAM'S STORY. * ------— CHAPTER I. MY BATAVIA PRACTICE. | It’s not a bad thing to be in medicine, if you people, where a fellow’s brain counts for sometbing, and he gets good price for good work that no one else can oO. But a young doctor without cash has a hard row to hoe, and don’t you forget it, most am- bitious of youtbs. It’s all very well to talk about the pleasures of and [I won’t deny that there's a certain pleasure about a good case of excision of the bip- joints, when a man uses the ‘‘ forty-second ” oper- ation, and hasto grab his arteries by the feel, | with the pleasant knowledge that if ke misses one, the chances are that he’ll have a “‘ stiff” on his hands inside of one minute, and a Jot of peo- a calling him a ‘“‘ murdering butcher” behind | 2 is back, all over the town. Yes, that’s exciting, certainly. And I’ve seen the time when I went nearly crazy over a nice healthy case of cancer in the pylorus, since the latest experiments in vivi- section. It was just glorious to feel that I was doing something never done before, and saving a man’s life, when the best surgeons in Europe had to give up Napoleon as a bad job. Wish I'd had a chance at hiscancer, He might og lived to see the Second Empire, poor fel. ow, But science won’t keep a man alive, when he’s got a stingy old uncle who won’t give hima square chance at home, through bis confounded jealousy; so bere I am, among the Dutchmen and Malays, and likely to stay here all the rest of my life, I fancy. Not but what I’ve a pretty comfortable sort of a cave to live in, and the doctors in Batavia are such a Jot of old-fashioned botches that I’ve had no trouble to scoop in quite a a practice. And the Dutch planters spend money like water, and drink ‘‘ rack punch ” so steady that they’re always running into fevers, I flatter myself I can kuock fevers about as | quick as any man I know in the reap apes sO t at hundred-dollar fees come in plenty to me. But for ai! that, I can’t help thinking how different it might bave been with me if I’d only had the sense to go for Mamie Bruce when she. was wooable, instead of fooling away my time like a calf, philandering round my respected but volatile auat by marriage, Mrs. Agnes Pe- in the world, I saw my dead cousin, Mungo | “ere. For I can’t belp thinking, without vanity, that I had as good acbance as any of the others. There were three men on the Spindrift, and I was one of them, who had an equal chance. Two of them were blind gone on the girl. One of them was as homely asa brush fence, but smart as chain-lightning; the other was § - looking, but constitutionally bashfal, and didn’t dare to make hay while the sun shone; and I was the third, with a knowledge of women the others did not possess, and not bad-looking, if J say it. ; * Dr. Sam’s account of the matters connected with the Flying Dutchman of 1880 has a fault common to medical men’s lucubrations, that of lugging in his dog-Latin and Greek names of diseases te the ears, | go to speak, at every tarn. To aid the non-profes- sional reader to understand his meaning, I have been obliged to annotate freely. The “ forty-second " operation that he refers to so gloatingly, is done, as the name implies, in less than a minute, and made the reputation of Dr. Say of Bellevue Hospital. It is extra hazardous, ‘ot course, as the limb is taken off in two or three cuts without tying the arteries, which have to be sought in the stump when they are pumping out blood by the quart. The pyle us, referred to lower down, is the passage from the stomach to the Intestines. Cancer here killed the great Napoleon. Since the late ri- ments in vivisection, Parisian surgeons have actually cut into the “— body of a sufferer from this te le disease, out the cancerous portion ‘and saved the patient. The doctor is excusable to r to this as one of the greatest triumphs of modern medical science. EDITOR. ANCE ICO (E() = ——__ Ce 4