1. CHAPTER I.
Sheppard Lee flies from the German doctor, and finds himself again
in New-Jersey.
The faster I fled, the faster it seemed to me I
was followed by the German doctor, who, I have
always believed, was driven crazy by the sudden
loss of his beloved mummy, and who, I had therefore
the greatest reason to fear, would, if he succeeded
in retaking me, be content with nothing
short of clapping me again into his glass case,
were it even a needful preliminary, as, in truth, it
must have been, to kill and embalm me over again.
And indeed I think the reader will allow, that the
fact of his following me three days and three nights,
still calling me a mummy, charging everybody he
met to stop me, and persisting to claim me as his
property, even after I had got among my own
friends, was a proof not only of insanity, but of
a desperate determination to rob me of life and
liberty.
Of this determination on his part I was myself
so strongly persuaded, and, in consequence, so
overcome by terror, that I am inclined to think I
was for a time nearly as mad as himself; and I
fled from before him with a speed which the
reader can only conceive when I tell him, that I
ran from the scene of my transformation on the
banks of the Potomac to my native village in New-Jersey,
a distance which I estimate at full one
hundred and eighty miles, in the short space of
three days and three nights, during which period I
rested but once, and that on the second night,
when, being very faint and weary, I lay down on
the earth and slept two hours.
This may be justly esteemed a truly wonderful
exploit, and it exceeds that of the great Daniel
Boone of Kentucky, of whom it is related that he
ran before a band of wild Indians the same distance,
or thereabouts, in four days' time; but it must be
remembered that I was fleeing from a raging madman,
whose speed was so nearly equal to my own,
that if I chanced but to flag a little in my exertions
at any time, I was sure to see him make his appearance
on the rear, or to hear his voice screaming
on the winds to “stop his mummy.” Indeed,
I ran with such haste, that I took no note of the
road upon which I travelled, and to this day I am
ignorant how I succeeded in passing the three great
rivers, the Potomac, the Chesapeake, and the Delaware,
which lay in my route, and which I must
have crossed in some way or other. And, for the
same reason, I am ignorant in what manner I sustained
existence during those three days, having not
the slightest recollection of eating a single meal
on the whole journey.
All that I can remember of the journey is, that I
ran I knew not whither, but with an instinctive
turning of my face towards the north; that I was
closely followed by the German doctor; and that,
about sundown on the third day, I found myself, to
my unspeakable joy, rushing through the Owl-roost
swamp, across the meadow, and by that identical
beech-tree where I had first lost my body, in full
view of my own house. The sight of that once
happy home of my childhood filled me with rapture.
I rushed towards it, hailed by a shout from
old Jim Jumble, my negro-man, backed by another
from his wife Dinah, that might have waked the
dead, they were so loud and uproarious, and found
myself in the arms of my dear, but long-neglected
sister Prudence, who, with her husband Alderwood,
and her three young children, was standing on the
porch.
Then, being wholly overcome by exhaustion of
body and mind, and having endured such fatigues
and sufferings from hunger and thirst, without
speaking of terror, as have seldom oppressed a poor
feeble human being, I fell into a swoon, from which
I awoke only to be assailed by a violent fever and
delirium, the direct consequences of my superhuman
exertions, that kept me a-bed, in a condition
between life and death, for more than two weeks.
During all this period I recollect being tormented
by the hateful visage of the German doctor,
who, having followed me like a bloodhound, daily
forced himself into my chamber, claimed me as his
property, and would doubtless have carried me off,
had it not been for my sister, my brother-in-law,
and the faithful Jim Jumble, the first of whom
watched at my bed-side like an angel, while the two
others opposed themselves to the enemy, and drove
him from the room. His persecutions, indeed, affected
me to a degree I cannot express, and were
the cause that, at the end of the two weeks as above
mentioned, I suddenly fell into a lethargy or trance,
the crisis of my disease, in which I lay two days,
and then awoke in my full senses, free from fever,
and convalescent.
How great was my satisfaction then to behold
myself surrounded by my friends, and in my own
house; how much greater to know I was no longer
to be persecuted by the odious German doctor,
who, my brother-in-law gave me to understand, in
reply to my anxious questions, had not only given
over all designs on my person, but had actually
departed from the neighbourhood, and from the
State of New-Jersey, satisfied, doubtless, that I
was a living man, and no longer a mummy.
