DURING my three days'stay in the town,I woke up every morning with the impression that I was a boy--for in my dreams the faces were all young again,and looked as they had looked in the old times--but I went to bed a hundred years old,every night--for meantime Ihad been seeing those faces as they are now.
Of course I suffered some surprises,along at first,before I had become adjusted to the changed state of things.
I met young ladies who did not seem to have changed at all;but they turned out to be the daughters of the young ladies I had in mind--sometimes their grand-daughters.When you are told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother,there is nothing surprising about it;but if,on the contrary,she is a person whom you knew as a little girl,it seems impossible.
You say to yourself,'How can a little girl be a grandmother.'
It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old,your friends have not been standing still,in that matter.
I noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women,not the men.I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly;but their wives had grown old.These were good women;it is very wearing to be good.
There was a saddler whom I wished to see;but he was gone.
Dead,these many years,they said.Once or twice a day,the saddler used to go tearing down the street,putting on his coat as he went;and then everybody knew a steamboat was coming.
Everybody knew,also,that John Stavely was not expecting anybody by the boat--or any freight,either;and Stavely must have known that everybody knew this,still it made no difference to him;he liked to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred thousand tons of saddles by this boat,and so he went on all his life,enjoying being faithfully on hand to receive and receipt for those saddles,in case by any miracle they should come.
A malicious Quincy paper used always to refer to this town,in derision as 'Stavely's Landing.'Stavely was one of my earliest admirations;I envied him his rush of imaginary business,and the display he was able to make of it,before strangers,as he went flying down the street struggling with his fluttering coat.
But there was a carpenter who was my chiefest hero.He was a mighty liar,but I did not know that;I believed everything he said.He was a romantic,sentimental,melodramatic fraud,and his bearing impressed me with awe.
I vividly remember the first time he took me into his confidence.He was planing a board,and every now and then he would pause and heave a deep sigh;and occasionally mutter broken sentences--confused and not intelligible--but out of their midst an ejaculation sometimes escaped which made me shiver and did me good:one was,'O God,it is his blood!'I sat on the tool-chest and humbly and shudderingly admired him;for I judged he was full of crime.
At last he said in a low voice--
'My little friend,can you keep a secret?'
I eagerly said I could.
'A dark and dreadful one?'
I satisfied him on that point.
'Then I will tell you some passages in my history;for oh,I MUST relieve my burdened soul,or I shall die!'
He cautioned me once more to be 'as silent as the grave;'then he told me he was a 'red-handed murderer.'
He put down his plane,held his hands out before him,contemplated them sadly,and said--'Look--with these hands I have taken the lives of thirty human beings!'
The effect which this had upon me was an inspiration to him,and he turned himself loose upon his subject with interest and energy.
He left generalizing,and went into details,--began with his first murder;described it,told what measures he had taken to avert suspicion;then passed to his second homicide,his third,his fourth,and so on.
He had always done his murders with a bowie-knife,and he made all my hairs rise by suddenly snatching it out and showing it to me.
At the end of this first seance I went home with six of his fearful secrets among my freightage,and found them a great help to my dreams,which had been sluggish for a while back.
I sought him again and again,on my Saturday holidays;in fact Ispent the summer with him--all of it which was valuable to me.
His fascinations never diminished,for he threw something fresh and stirring,in the way of horror,into each successive murder.
He always gave names,dates,places--everything.This by and by enabled me to note two things:that he had killed his victims in every quarter of the globe,and that these victims were always named Lynch.
The destruction of the Lynches went serenely on,Saturday after Saturday,until the original thirty had multiplied to sixty--and more to be heard from yet;then my curiosity got the better of my timidity,and I asked how it happened that these justly punished persons all bore the same name.
My hero said he had never divulged that dark secret to any living being;but felt that he could trust me,and therefore he would lay bare before me the story of his sad and blighted life.
He had loved one 'too fair for earth,'and she had reciprocated 'with all the sweet affection of her pure and noble nature.'