University of Virginia Library

31. CHAPTER XXXI.

The missionary party was dissolved at Timberopolis
and I set out for Glenville alone. One night was to be
past on the road: and I, therefore, so ordered matters as
to tarry that night with a friend, who had cordially invited
me to make his house my home in case I ever should
travel that way.

It was early in the evening when I reached his cabin,
but no one, to my surprise, appeared in answer to repeated
calls; yet there being manifest signs of inhabitants, I dismounted
and entered the house without ceremony. And
of course I found the family—but all in bed! Yes! the
mother—and every mother's son of them and daughter too:
—they had the ague!

Two, indeed, were a sort of convalescent; yet eight
were too ill to sit up voluntarily. Instead, therefore of being
ministered unto, I myself became a minister, and set
right to work, assisting the partly renovated son and
daughter in getting wood, in boiling water, and in handing
along jesuit bark, and sulphate of quinine. We three
cooked, in partnership, something for supper—what, I never
exactly knew—it was in sad contrast to the Wyoming
banquet! and that night I shared a bed with the squalid and
dejected ague-smitten son!

For the accommodation of the nine others, were four
other beds—the sleepers averaging thus two and a quarter
per bed. In our room were two beds in the adjoining one
three: an arrangement tending to purify the air, ten of the
sleepers being sick and exhaling fœtid breath. Was it
then so very surprising after all, that within one day after
reaching Glenville, our historian, having been with missionaries
in aguish districts, and having had a comfortable
night's repose amid this aguish household, should himself
contrive to get, in the very last chapter of his first volume
—the Fever and Ague? Alas! many a volume equally
promising in its beginning becomes sickly in its close: a
character perhaps of all books detailing life as it is! For
what, pray, is life itself, except a progress from elastic infancy
to flaccid old age!—from hope to disappointment!—
from health to sickness!—from living to dying?

Reader!—(supposing one is this far)—perhaps you have
discovered that the writer is disposed to laugh as well as
cry: not maliciously—but in a spirit of—of—“Good nature,
Mr. Carlton?” That is it, my dear reader; however,
our delicacy and good taste preferred another to praise us.
Well, we have found that such spirit, within its due bounds,
is a great help in sustaining misfortunes and adversities,
especially our—neighbour's; and it does seem a compensative
in some natures that their melancholy states may
be followed by joyous and sunny ones. And not rarely
have our elastic tendencies lifted us from deep and miry
“sloughs of despond;” and even yet, after the crushing of
fond hopes, and the endurance of exceedingly weighty
griefs, we laugh even loud although in a subdued tone;—
for the dear ones we laughed with in earlier days can
never, never join again their merry voice with ours!—but
then even in our tears we smile, because we trust to smile
and rejoice with these again and without danger of sin,
amid serene and perfect and perpetual joys!

This premised, what was more natural than that we
should laugh at the Fever and Ague—when our neighbours
had this twin disease? Indeed, hearing the patients themselves
jest about it, how was it possible not to join with
them? At last I was seized with this mirth-creating malady
myself: and of course you wish to know how I behaved
myself. Well, at first I laughed as heartily as ever
—just as I once did in the first stage of sea-sickness. And
then I took emetics, and cathartics, and herb-teas, and barks,
and bitters, and quinine, and hot toddies seasoned with pepper,
oh! with such winning smiles!—that the folks all said
—“it was quite a privilege!—hem!—to wait on me!”

Fye! on our hypocrisy and selfishness! all this captivating
behaviour arose from a persuasion that it would aid
a speedy cure! And for a time the enemy seemed willing
to be smiled away—with the “coelaboration” of the above
smile-creating doses—and, I do believe, we got to laughing
more than ever. But one day after my cure, on returning
from a little walk extra—(with a rifle on my
shoulder)—a very gentle, but rather chilly sensation began
very ridiculously to trickle down my spine—and there,
would you believe it, was our Monsheer Tonson again!

Now, be it remembered, here was a surprise and a cowardly
and treacherous assault, if I now for the first looked
—grum: besides it was evident good nature was no permanent
cure for the ague. Nay, Dr. Sylvan told me that
once he had the ague, and repeatedly after he was cured
the thing kept sneaking back and down his back; till on
the last occasion coming, after it had seemingly been physicked
to death like some of the patients, he was so incensed
at its impudence as to set to and so kick and stamp and
toss and dance and wriggle about, that the fit was
actually stormed out! and from that hour no ague, dumb,
vocal, or shaking had ever ventured near him! Had I
heard this in time, my insidious foe would have been treated

to a similar assault and battery. But, perhaps, so
violent exercise on my part might have only accelerated
and made fatal a crisis now approaching; for soon I became
so alarmingly ill that John Glenville was posting to
Woodville for Dr. Sylvan: but before he could have
reached that place I was raging in the delirium of fever!

Two things in the events of that dreadful night seem
worth mentioning: first, while nothing done to or for me
was known, I have to this day the most distinct remembrance
of my phrenzy visions; and secondly, that hours
dwindled into minutes; for seeming only to shut and open
my eyes, it was said afterwards that then I had slept even
two full hours!—and that my countenance and motions indicated
a state of fearful mental agitation. In that state
two visions, each repeated and re-repeated with vivid intensity,
and seeming to fill spaces of time like those marked
by flashes of lightning, were so terrific and appalling as
to force me to violent gestures and alarming outcries.

One vision was this. A gigantic cuirassier, more than
twenty feet high, and steel clad, was mounted on a mammoth
of jet black color and glistening, and moving with the
grace and swiftness of an antelope. On the rider's left was
couched a spear in size like a beam, and its barbed point
flaming as the fires of a furnace: while in his right hand
was brandished an immense sword of scimetar shape, and
so intensely bright as to blind the beholders. To oppose
this apparition was drawn out in battle a large army, with
all the apparatus of war, swords, spears, smaller fire arms,
and the heaviest artillery—the troops being in several lines
with cannon in the centre and rifles on the wings; and all
ready with levelled weapons and burning matches awaiting
the onset of the terrific rider—Death! Soon came a
signal flash from the heavens clothed in sackcloth looking
clouds—a kind of meteor sunlight—and at its gleam the
cuirassier on his Black Mammeth, like a tempest driven

by a whirlwind, swept rushing on!—the nostrils of the
strange beast dilated with fiery foam, his hoofs thundering
over the rocks and streaming fire; while the rider, upright
in the stirrups, poised with one hand his spear, and with
the other flashed his scimetar, and uttered a war-cry so
loud and clear as to reach the very heavens and appal and
confound the stoutest hearts! At this instant would I be
possessed with a strange and invincible furor, and pouring
forth shrieks and outcries in answer to the war-cry of the
warrior-spirit, I would strike with my clenched hands as if
armed with weapons—while the army awaiting our now
combined onset raised their responsive shouts of defiance,
and then poured out against us stream after stream of fire,
with the clatter and crash and roar of many thunders—but
in vain!—On, on, on we rushed!—the earth shook and
groaned and broke asunder into yawning gulfs and sulphureous
caverns!—and down, down, down sank the troops,
smitten, dismayed, crushed!—while the Black Mammoth,
reeling from ten thousand balls, and spears and barbed arrows,
with the fiendish voice of many demons, plunged
headlong into the discomfited host, and there falling with
the shock of an earthquake, crushed men, cannon, horses,
spears, into one horrible, quivering mass! Then from
amidst this ruin up sprang the giant-spirit with triumphant
shouts, and strided away to mount another Black Mammoth,
and renew with variations this battle of my exahusting
vision!

My other vision was as solemn to me as ever can be the
very article of death. Methought I lay in a little, narrow,
frail canoe, and with power neither to move nor speak—yet
with as keen perceptions as if I were all senses. The
canoe itself was at the head of a gulf, tied to its bank with
a twine of thread and trembling on its violent waves; the
gulf being between walls of rock towering away up smooth
and perpendicular for many hundred feet, and running with

dark and dismal waters very swiftly towards a narrow opening
through an adamantine rock. That opening was an
egress into an unknown, bottomless, shoreless, chaotic and
wildly tumultuating ocean!—I felt myself quivering on the
current of time just as it was sweeping into Eternity!—I
saw strange sights!—I heard unearthly sounds! Oh! the
unutterable anguish and despair as I lay helpless and awaited
the sundering of my cobweb tie—in the twinkling of an
eye should I pass into that vast and dread unknown!

Reader! was this really sleep—and did I only dream?
—or was it the summoning of the spirit to see in a trance
what awaits us all? Aye! be assured our dreams are not
always dreams! A spirit-world is round us—and it is perhaps
in such visions God designs we should catch faint
glimpses of that other state? Sneer, vile Atheist[28] —the
hour is coming when we shall sneer at thee!—for the
“wicked shall rise to shame and everlasting contempt!”

When Glenville returned from Woodville, he was accompanied
not by Doctor Slyvan, but by the Doctor's nephew—
one of the two young gentlemen of Indian grave memory.
And he brought a long paper of written and minute directions;
and among others, the Doctor's favourite plan of
changing the character of agues—for making a dumb ague
speak or shake. It answered well, I believe, with all patients
of vigorous constitution: at all events, if one could
endure it, nothing could so fairly make a dumb ague not
only shake, but speak, ay, and scream right out But when
that part of the prescription was read to me, I most obstinately
refused to have my ague thus converted: and yet as
the bare reading made me shiver, doubtless, the operation
itself would have made me shake like an earthquake!
Sticking, therefore, to my refusal, my dumb ague, as Doctor

Sylvan predicted, stuck to me; and for twelve long cheerless
months! Yet, here is an extract from the Doctor's
paper, so that it can be better judged whether my refusal
was altogether owing to obstinacy:—

“—— and then, as the shaking ague is altogether
tractable, his dumb ague must be immediately changed
into the other. Carry then your patient into the passage
between the two cabins, or into the open air, and strip off
all his clothes that he may lie naked in the cold air and
upon a bare sacking—and then and there pour over and
upon him successive buckets of cold spring water, and continue
until he has a decided and pretty powerful smart
chance of a shake.”

Ohhoo! ooh!—(double oo in moon, with very strong aspiration)—it
makes me shake now!

Well!—at long last the dumb thing left me; so that I
lived to write more books than two: but we shall not say
how often we “put on a damp night-cap and relapsed,”
nor how apparently near what began in laughing came to
ending in tears. Only let my reader draw from this case
two practical resolutions:—

First—to cultivate a fixed determination never to get any
kind of an ague—if he can help it: and

Secondly, to indulge no unseeming pleasantry when he
sees a neighbour shiver or shake—unless that neighbour
insist manfully that you shall laugh rather than cry with him.

Shortly after my first convalescence, the Hon. John
Glenville departed for the House; and there, among other
matters, he assisted in having Robert Carlton, Esq., appointed
one of the Trustees of the College at Woodville;
with orders to procure as soon as possible competent professors
and teachers. For this I wrote to my friend, Charles
Clarence, then in the Theological School at Princeton,
New Jersey; but his reply belongs to our next year, and, indeed,
to a new era of the Purchase, and hence, we may very
appropriately end here—a Chapter—a Year—and a Volume.