‘Prosperous—­live here yet—­town littered with their children.’

I asked about Miss ——.

Died in the insane asylum three or four years ago—­never was out of it from the time she went in; and was always suffering, too; never got a shred of her mind back.’

If he spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed.  Thirty-six years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun!  I was a small boy, at the time; and I saw those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into the room where Miss ——­ sat reading at midnight by a lamp.  The girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface, she crept behind the victim, touched her on the shoulder, and she looked up and screamed, and then fell into convulsions.  She did not recover from the fright, but went mad.  In these days it seems incredible that people believed in ghosts so short a time ago.  But they did.

After asking after such other folk as I could call to mind, I finally inquired about myself: 

’Oh, he succeeded well enough—­another case of damned fool.  If they’d sent him to St. Louis, he’d have succeeded sooner.’

It was with much satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom of having told this candid gentleman, in the beginning, that my name was Smith.

Chapter 54 Past and Present

Being left to myself, up there, I went on picking out old houses in the distant town, and calling back their former inmates out of the moldy past.  Among them I presently recognized the house of the father of Lem Hackett (fictitious name).  It carried me back more than a generation in a moment, and landed me in the midst of a time when the happenings of life were not the natural and logical results of great general laws, but of special orders, and were freighted with very precise and distinct purposes—­partly punitive in intent, partly admonitory; and usually local in application.

When I was a small boy, Lem Hackett was drowned—­on a Sunday.  He fell out of an empty flat-boat, where he was playing.  Being loaded with sin, he went to the bottom like an anvil.  He was the only boy in the village who slept that night.  We others all lay awake, repenting.  We had not needed the information, delivered from the pulpit that evening, that Lem’s was a case of special judgment—­we knew that, already.  There was a ferocious thunder-storm, that night, and it raged continuously until near dawn.  The winds blew, the windows rattled, the rain swept along the roof in pelting sheets, and at the briefest of intervals the inky blackness of the night vanished, the houses over the way glared out white and blinding for a quivering instant, then the solid darkness shut down again and a splitting peal of thunder followed, which seemed to rend everything in the neighborhood to shreds and splinters.  I sat up in bed quaking and shuddering, waiting for the destruction of the