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- 11058
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- 2026-01-30T03:55:03.883Z
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- 10981
- text
- ‘My daughters,’ said I, mildly, ‘you should remember that this is not
Madame Pazzi, the conjuress, you put your questions to, but the eminent
naturalist, Professor Johnson. And now, Professor,’ I added, ‘be pleased
to explain. Enlighten our ignorance.’
Without repeating all the learned gentleman said--for, indeed, though
lucid, he was a little prosy--let the following summary of his
explication suffice.
The incident was not wholly without example. The wood of the table was
apple-tree, a sort of tree much fancied by various insects. The bugs had
come from eggs laid inside the bark of the living tree in the orchard.
By careful examination of the position of the hole from which the last
bug had emerged, in relation to the cortical layers of the slab, and
then allowing for the inch and a half along the grain, ere the bug had
eaten its way entirely out, and then computing the whole number of
cortical layers in the slab, with a reasonable conjecture for the number
cut off from the outside, it appeared that the egg must have been laid
in the tree some ninety years, more or less, before the tree could have
been felled. But between the felling of the tree and the present time,
how long might that be? It was a very old-fashioned table. Allow eighty
years for the age of the table, which would make one hundred and fifty
years that the bug had lain in the egg. Such, at least, was Professor
Johnson’s computation.
‘Now, Julia,’ said I, ‘after that scientific statement of the case
(though, I confess, I don’t exactly understand it) where are your
spirits? It is very wonderful as it is, but where are your spirits?’
‘Where, indeed?’ said my wife.
‘Why, now, she did not _really_ associate this purely natural phenomenon
with any crude, spiritual hypothesis, did she?’ observed the learned
professor, with a slight sneer.
‘Say what you will,’ said Julia, holding up, in the covered tumbler, the
glorious, lustrous, flashing, live opal, ‘say what you will, if this
beauteous creature be not a spirit, it yet teaches a spiritual lesson.
For if, after one hundred and fifty years’ entombment, a mere insect
comes forth at last into light, itself an effulgence, shall there be no
glorified resurrection for the spirit of man? Spirits! spirits!’ she
exclaimed, with rapture, ‘I still believe in them with delight, when
before I but thought of them with terror.’
The mysterious insect did not long enjoy its radiant life; it expired
the next day. But my girls have preserved it. Embalmed in a silver
vinaigrette, it lies on the little apple-tree table in the pier of the
cedar-parlour.
And whatever lady doubts this story, my daughters will be happy to show
her both the bug and the table, and point out to her, in the repaired
slab of the latter, the two sealing-wax drops designating the exact
place of the two holes made by the two bugs, something in the same way
in which are marked the spots where the cannon balls struck Brattle
Street church.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
UNDER THE ROSE
(_Being an extract from an old MS. entitled ‘Travels in Persia (Iran)
by a servant of My Lord the Ambassador.’_)
... These roses of divers hues, red, yellow, pink, and white, the black
slave, a clean-limbed adolescent, and comely for all his flat nose; he,
before offering them to My Lord to refresh him with their colour and
scent, did, at the Azem’s bidding, drop them into a delicate vase of
amber; and so cunningly, withal, that they fell as of themselves into
the attitude of young damsels leaning over the balustrade of a dome and
gazing downward; so that the vase itself was all but hidden from view,
at least, much of the upper part thereof, where I noted that certain
_relievos_ were, though truly I could get but a peep thereof at that
time.
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