The Funny Side of Physic Part 38

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE NAGLES BOYS.]

On the following day great preparations were made to "wake" the old gentleman according to the most approved fashion in the old country. There were many Irish living--_staying_, at least--in that town, and large quant.i.ties of pipes, tobacco, and whiskey were bought up, and the whole town knew that a "powerful time" was antic.i.p.ated by the Irish who were invited to old Nagles' wake. It was an unusual occurrence, and several boys and young men of the village went to the locality of the Nagles'

house to get a look upon the scene when it got under full pressure. I certainly should have been there had not my parents forbidden me to go, and I regret the inability to give my personal testimony to the truth of the statement of what followed, as I do to what preceded, as related above.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHIEF MOURNERS.]

"When the wake was at its height, the room full of tobacco smoke, and the jovial mourners full of Irish whiskey,--strychnine and fusel oil,--there was an alarm of fire in the neighborhood. There was a grand rush from the room, as well as from the windows where stood the listeners, and only one old and drunken woman remained to watch the corpse. The door was left open, and some of the young men outside, thinking it a good opportunity to play a joke on the drunken party, ran into the room, and, seeing only the old woman, who was too drunk to offer any objections, they removed the body from the board, depositing it behind the boxes on which the board was laid, and one of their number took the place of the corpse, barely having time to draw the sheet over his face, when the 'wakers' returned.

"The candles burned dimly through the hazy atmosphere of the old room, and no one noticed the change. The pipes were relighted, the whiskey freely pa.s.sed, and finally one fellow proposed to offer the corpse a lighted pipe and a gla.s.s of whiskey, 'for company's sake, through purgatory.'

"Suiting the action to the word, he approached, attempted to raise the head of the 'lively corpse,' and thrust the nasty pipe between his teeth.

"The young man 'playing corpse' was no smoker, and in infinite disgust he motioned the fellow away, who, too drunk to notice it, stuck the pipe in his face, saying, 'Here, ould man, take a shmoke for your ghost's sake.'

"'Bah! Git away wid the div'lish nasty thing,' exclaimed the young man, rising and sitting up in the coffin.

"There was an instantaneous stampede from the room of every waker who was capable of rising to his legs, followed by the fellow in the sheet, who, dropping the ghostly covering at the door, mingled with the rabble, and was not recognized. The priest and the doctor were speedily summoned. The former arrived, heard, outside the house, the wonderful story, and then proceeded to lay the spirit by sprinkling holy water on the door-stone, thence into the room. By this time the smoke had sufficiently subsided to allow a view of the room, when the stiff, frigid body of old Nagles was discovered on the floor, where 'it had fallen,' as they supposed, 'in attempting to walk.' Of course the doctor ridiculed the idea of a stark, cold body rising and speaking; but the Irish, to this day, believe old Nagles, for that once, refused a pipe and a gla.s.s of whiskey. The few young men dared not divulge the secret, and it never leaked out till the entire family of Nagles had gone to parts unknown."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CORPSE THAT WOULD NOT SMOKE.]

I find a great many ghost stories in books, which are not explained; but since the writer knows nothing of their authenticity, nor the persons with whom they were connected, they are unworthy of notice here.

THE GHOST OF CaeSAR AT PHILIPPI.

Dr. Robert Macnish, of Glasgow, in his "Philosophy of Sleep," says, "No doubt the apparition of Caesar which appeared to Brutus, and declared it would meet him at Philippi, was either a dream or a spectral illusion--probably the latter. Brutus, in all likelihood, had some idea that the great battle which was to decide his fate would be fought at Philippi. Probably it was a good military position, which he had in his mind fixed upon as a fit place to make a final stand; and he had done enough to Caesar to account for his mind being painfully and constantly engrossed with the image of the a.s.sa.s.sinated dictator. Hence the verification of this supposed warning; hence the easy explanation of a supposed supernatural event."

"The ghost of Byron" may help to verify the above. Sir Walter Scott was engaged in his study at Abbotsford, not long after the death of Lord Byron, at about the twilight hour, in reading a sketch of the deceased poet. The room was quiet, his thoughts were intensely centred upon the person of his departed friend, when, as he laid down the volume, as he could see to read no longer, and pa.s.sed into the hall, he saw before him the _eidolon_ of the deceased poet. He remained for some time impressed by the intensity of the illusion, which had thus created a phantom out of some clothes hanging on a screen at the farther end of the hall.

This is not the first time that Byron had appeared to his friends, as the following, from his own pen, will show:--

Byron wrote to his friend, Alexander Murray, less than two years before the death of the latter, as follows:--

"In 1811, my old schoolmate and form-fellow, Robert Peel, the Irish secretary, told me that he saw me in St. James Street. I was then in Turkey. A day or two afterwards, he pointed out to his brother a person across the street, and said, 'There is the man I took for Byron.' His brother answered, 'Why, it is Byron, and no one else.' I was at this time _seen_ (by them?) to write my name in the Palace Book! I was then ill of a malaria fever. If I had died," adds Byron, "here would have been a ghost story established."

Dr. Johnson says, "An honest old printer named Edward Cave had seen a ghost at St. John's Gate." Of course, the old man succ.u.mbed to the apparition.

THE GHOST OF CONSCIENCE.

I have yet to find the record of a good man seeing what he believed to be a ghostly manifestation. It is only the guilty in conscience who conjure up "horrible shadows," as pictured in Shakspeare's ghost of Banquo, as it appeared to Macbeth. What deserving scorn, what scathing contempt, were conveyed in the language of Lady Macbeth to her cowardly, conscience-stricken lord, as she thus rebuked him!--

"O, proper stuff!

This is the very painting of your fear; This is the air-drawn dagger which you said Led you to Duncan! O, these flaws and starts (Impostors to true fear) would well become A woman's story at a winter's fire,[5]

Authorized by her grandam. Shame itself!

... When all's done, You look but on a stool!"

There is a great truth embodied in a portion of the king's reply, that--

"If charnel-houses and our graves must send Those that we bury, back, our monuments Shall be the maws of kites."

The gay and dissipated Thomas Lyttleton, son of Lord George Lyttleton, and his successor in the peerage, has been the subject of "a well-authenticated ghost story, which relates that he was warned of his death three days before it happened, in 1779, while he was in a state of perfect health, and only thirty-five years of age." This is what says a biographer. Now let us present the truth of the matter.

He was a dissipated man. He was subject to fits. A gentleman present at the time of his seeing a vision, says "that he had been attacked several times by suffocative fits the month before." Here, then, was a _body diseased_. The same authority says, "It happened that he dreamed, three days before his death, that he saw a _fluttering bird_; and afterwards, that he saw (dreamed) a woman in white apparel, who said to him, 'Prepare to die; you will not exist three days.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: PREPARE TO DIE!]

"His lordship was much alarmed, and called his servant, who slept in an adjoining closet, who found his master in a state of great agitation, and in a profuse perspiration."

Fear blanches the cheek; perspiration is rather a symptom of bodily weakness, and the result of a laborious dream, or even a fit. He had no fear, for, on the third day, while his lordship was at breakfast with "the two Misses Amphlett, Lord Fortescue," and the narrator, he said, lightly,--

"'If I live over to-night, _I shall have jockeyed the ghost_, for this is the third day.' That day he had another fit. He dined at five, and retired at eleven, when his servant was about to give him some prescribed rhubarb and mint-water, but his lordship, seeing him about to stir the mixture with a toothpick, exclaimed,--

"'You slovenly dog, go and fetch a teaspoon.'

"On the servant's return, he found his master in another fit, and, the pillow being high, his chin bore on his windpipe, when the servant, instead of relieving his lordship from his perilous position, ran away for help; but on his return, found his master dead."

He had strangled. Is it anything strange that a dissipated, weakened man should die after having a score of suffocative fits? It had been more surprising if he had survived them. Then, as respecting the dream, it was the result of a "mind diseased."

There was evidence that his lordship had seduced the Misses Amphlett, and prevailed upon them to leave their mother; and he is said to have admitted, before his death, that the woman seen in his dream was the mother of the unfortunate girls, and that she died of grief, through the disgrace and desertion of her children, about the time that the guilty seducer saw her in the vision. How could his dreams but have been disturbed, with the load of guilt and remorse that he ought to have had resting upon his conscience? The "fluttering bird" was the first form that the wretched mother a.s.sumed in his vision, as a bird might flutter about the prison bars that confined her darling offspring. The more natural form of the mother finally appeared to the guilty seducer, and to dream that he heard a voice is no unusual occurrence in the life of any person. The peculiar words amount to nothing. Lyttleton gave them no serious thoughts, and it was an accident of bodily position that caused his sudden death.

The whole thing seems to be too flimsy for even a respectable "ghost story."

THE BISHOP SEES A GHOST!

An amusing as well as instructive ghost story is related by Horace Walpole, the indolent, luxurious satirist of fashionable and political contemporaries, whose twenty thousand a year enabled him to live at his ease, "coquetting haughtily with literature and literary men, at his tasty Gothic toy-house at Strawberry Hill."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BISHOP'S GHOSTLY VISITOR.]

He relates that the good old Bishop of Chichester was awakened in his palace at an early hour in the morning by his chamber door opening, when a female figure, clothed in white, softly entered the apartment, and quietly took a seat near him. The prelate, who, with "his household, was a disbeliever in ghosts" and spirits, said he was not at all frightened, but, rising in his bed, said, in a tone of authority,--

"Who are you?"

"The presence in the room" made no reply. The bishop repeated the question,--

"Who are you?"

The ghost only heaved a deep sigh, and, while the bishop rang the bell, to call his slumbering servant, her ghostship quietly drew some old "papers from its ghost of a pocket," and commenced reading them to herself.

After the bishop had kept on ringing for the stupid servant, the form arose, thrust the papers out of sight, and left as noiselessly and sedately as she had arrived.

"Well, what have you seen?" asked the bishop, when the servants were aroused.

"Seen, my lord?"