University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.
Containing the substance of a singular debate betwixt the Author
and his brother, with a philosophic defence of the Author's credibility.

And now, having arrived at the close of my adventurous
career, I have but a few additions to
make to my story before concluding it entirely.

I took an early opportunity to impart to my
brother-in-law a faithful account of my adventures,
as well as a resolution which I had already formed
to commit them to writing, and publish them for
the benefit of the world; for I was persuaded they
contained a moral which might prove of service to
many persons, who, like myself, had fallen into the
error of supposing they were assigned to a harsher
lot than their fellows.

This resolution Alderwood opposed with all his
might, being concerned lest such an enterprise as
writing a book should divert my mind from the labours
of the farm, and, indeed, seduce me again
into habits of idleness. Besides, he was afraid the
strangeness of my adventures would cause them to
be received with incredulity, whereby I might suffer
in reputation, and be looked upon only as a
dreamer and teller of falsehoods. His chief reasons,
however, I doubt not, were the two first mentioned;
for he was anxious I should now think of
nothing but my farm. His dislike to my design
was, in truth, so great, that, having exhausted all
the arguments he could muster in the vain design
to overcome it, he had resort to a new mode of opposition,
an expedient highly ingenious, but not a
little ridiculous. He endeavoured to shake my
own faith in my story!—to convince me that I had
imagined all I have related, and that, in a word, I
had never encountered any adventures at all. I
protest I am diverted to this day when I think of
the mingled anxiety and address which he displayed

on the occasion. He assured me, and that quite
plumply, that during the whole two years (to speak
strictly, it was only twenty months) of my wanderings,
I had never once been off the forty-acre farm;
that I had never been in any body besides my own;
and that the whole source of the notion on my part
lay in a hallucination of mind which had suddenly
attacked me, filling me with ridiculous conceits of
various transformations, such as never had happened,
and never could happen, to any human being.
And this absurd account he persisted in as long as
he could with any decency, giving me repeated
hints that my mother had died insane, and that it
was not therefore strange I should have been a
little odd once in my life. I showed him the place
where I had been digging under the beech-tree
(where, by-the-way, I was weak enough afterward
to make Jim Jumble sink a pit twelve feet deep, to
satisfy myself that Captain Kid's money really did
not lie there); which place, however, he averred
was as great a proof of the truth of his story as of
mine: “For,” said he, “none but a madman would
dig for Captain Kid's money.” I led him to the
willow-bushes, and the old worm fence in the
marsh, where I had found Squire Higginson's body;
which he allowed I might have done, but protested
that other persons had found it also; and that instead
of going home alive in Squire Higginson's
barouche, it had been carried to Philadelphia in a
coffin; and as for Higginson's being clapped into
prison for my murder, it was I, he said who had
been confined on suspicion of having been concerned
in his, until, as he said, it was found that I
was out of my wits, and that Higginson had died
of an apoplexy.

I then referred to a circumstance that had happened
during my late sickness, as affording the
fullest confirmation of my story. The circumstance
was this. While still lying tormented with fever,
but at a moment when my mind was sound and lucid,
Jim Jumble put a newspaper into my hand, in
which, by a singular coincidence, appeared an account
of my late transformation in Virginia, with
an allusion to the fate of Zachariah Longstraw, by
which I learned, for the first time, what had become
of his body after I left it. From the article,
which, strangely, and yet naturally enough, was
headed “Outrageous Humbug, and Fatal Consequence
thereof,” it seemed to be universally believed
that Dr. Feuerteufel's mummy was no mummy
at all, but a living man, as I myself had heard it
called in the village, with whom he had leagued in
a conspiracy to hoax and swindle the good people
of the south out of their money; and that the imposture
had been detected by Mr. Arthur Megrim,
who, proceeding to force the glass box, was knocked
down by the pretended dead man, and so unfortunately
killed, the mummy and his accomplice, the
doctor, making their escape in the confusion. The
editor of the paper, after noticing a second account,
by which it was asserted that the unfortunate Megrim,
though overturned by the pretended mummy

in his flight, had received no injury from him, but,
on the contrary, had died of sheer fright and horror,
being of a nervous, hypochondriacal turn, and acknowledging
that this account was more probable,
inveighed warmly against the villany and audacity
of the swindlers; who, he said, were more legitimate
objects on whom to wreak the vengeance of
Lynchdom than the people of that district had found
in Zachariah Longstraw, the philanthropist. And
here the editor reminded his readers of the fate of
that excellent and distinguished individual, who had
died in the Lynchers' hands the preceding autumn,
against the ringleaders of whom his nephew, Mr.
Jonathan Truelove, had so vainly attempted to establish
legal proceedings.

To this account, I say, I referred as containing
an argument of my truth not to be resisted; but,
unfortunately, the paper had by some means or other
vanished, and Alderwood said my story went for
nothing without it. That paper, I have always
thought, he had himself got possession of and secreted.
But had I even retained and shown it to
him, I doubt whether it would have affected him
in the least; for he was one of those skeptical men
who believed a thing none the sooner for finding it
in a newspaper.

In a word, there is no expressing the obstinacy
of my brother in rejecting my story, nor the adroitness
with which he met such proofs as I could give
him of the truth of it. The last instance of it
which I shall relate was his taking the part of the

German doctor, Feuerteufel, who, he declared, had
not only never made a mummy of me, but had not
laid claim to me as his property, though he himself
(that is, my brother-in-law) had been present at
least a dozen times when the German doctor did so
in my sick-chamber, from which Alderwood was so
instrumental in expelling him. He even insisted
that this man, having made a second and last visit
to our village to hunt plants and reptiles, had been
employed (and at his own instance too) to cure me
of that very malady he so ridiculously would have
me believe I had been afflicted with, and that it
was to him, under Heaven, I owed my restoration
to health. Nay, he even went the length of showing
me what he called the doctor's bill; and, true
enough, it was a bill, with a receipt in full upon it;
but the amount being prodigiously great, I saw at
once into the whole affair, which was nothing less
than a masked contract betwixt my brother-in-law
and the doctor, whereby the latter secretly covenanted,
in consideration of the large sum received
from the former, to persecute me no longer with his
claims, and perhaps to leave the country altogether.

Besides all this, my brother attacked me by demanding
by what means it was that I had transferred
my spirit so often, and so easily, from one
body to another. And this being a question on
which the reader may require satisfaction as well
as my brother, I must allow that it presents a difficulty,
and a very great one. All that I can say
to this is, first, that I did transfer my spirit from

body to body, and no less than seven different
times; secondly, that these seven translations of
spirit indicated in me the possession of a peculiar
power to make them; and thirdly, that the existence
of such a peculiar power, however wonderful
it may appear, is not beyond the bounds of philosophic
probability.

No man can be so ignorant or skeptical as to deny,
that there are several different faculties of a most
marvellous nature, with which a few individuals in
the world are mysteriously endowed, while the
great mass of men are entirely without them; and
to the number of these supernatural endowments
there is scarce a year passes by without adding a
new one. What can be, or ought to be, considered
a more surprising faculty than that of ventriloquism,—the
art of throwing the voice into places
and things afar from the operator, of taking, as it
were, the lungs, glottis, &c. from his body, and clapping
them into a chest, log, stone wall, or other inanimate
substance, or into the body of another?
and how few are there in the world who possess
the power of doing so! One man thumps his chin
with his fingers, and draws from it pure and agreeable
musical tones, and another whistles a melody
in parts; while men in general might thump and
whistle till their teeth fell out without producing any
music worth listening to. What can be more wonderful
than the faculty recently developed by the
advocates and practitioners of a new system of medicine,
who, by shaking a bottle in a peculiar way,

give to its contents a medical virtue which did not
exist before, and which another man,—the patient,
for example,—might shake till doomsday without
imparting?*

The Natural Bonesetter is one instance of the
possession of a faculty both rare and astonishing,
and so is any old woman who can pow-wow the
fire out of a burn. Not to multiply inferior instances,
however, I will ask the reader if any
faculty can be deemed more incredible than that
of the magnetizer, who, by flourishing his digits
about your body, now cures your rheumatism, and
now sets you sound asleep—unless it be that of the
magnetized slumberer, who reads a sealed letter
laid on his epigastrium, sees through millstones
and men's bodies, and renders oraculous responses
to any question that may be proposed him, even
though it be upon subjects of which, while awake,
he is entirely ignorant.

In fine, granting all these things to be true (and
who shall dare to doubt them), why should it not
be granted that an individual should possess the
power of transferring his spirit from body to body
at will—a power but little more extraordinary (if
indeed it be more extraordinary) than the other
faculties which are admitted to have actual existence?

To me it seems that the thing is natural
enough, though still, I grant, extremely wonderful.
Many persons are thought to possess the ventriloquial,
and even the magnetic power, without being
conscious of the endowment, accident having been
in all cases the cause of their being made acquainted
with its existence. In the same way, it
is not improbable that other persons besides myself
may possess the faculty of reanimating dead
bodies, without suspecting it; for I can scarce believe
the faculty should be confined entirely to
myself.