Pardon me, my dear Sir, for troubling you with such a list of notes of interrogation.  There are some very strange things going on here in this place, country-town as it is.  Country-life is apt to be dull; but when it once gets going, it beats the city hollow, because it gives its whole mind to what it is about.  These rural sinners make terrible work with the middle of the Decalogue, when they get started.  However, I hope I shall live through my year’s school-keeping without catastrophes, though there are queer doings about me which puzzle me and might scare some people.  If anything should happen, you will be one of the first to hear of it, no doubt.  But I trust not to help out the editors of the “Rockland Weekly Universe” with an obituary of the late lamented, who signed himself in life—­

Your friend and pupil,
Bernard C. Langdon.

The Professor to Mr. Langdon.

My dear Mr. Langdon, I do not wonder that you find no answer from your country friends to the curious questions you put.  They belong to that middle region between science and poetry which sensible men, as they are called, are very shy of meddling with.  Some people think that truth and gold are always to be washed for; but the wiser sort are of opinion, that, unless there are so many grains to the peck of sand or nonsense respectively, it does not pay to wash for either, so long as one can find anything else to do.  I don’t doubt there is some truth in the phenomena of animal magnetism, for instance; but when you ask me to cradle for it, I tell you that the hysteric girls cheat so, and the professionals are such a set of pickpockets, that I can do something better than hunt for the grains of truth among their tricks and lies.  Do you remember what I used to say in my lectures?—­or were you asleep just then, or cutting your initials on the rail? (You see I can ask questions, my young friend.) Leverage is everything,—­was what I used to say;—­don’t begin to pry till you have got the long arm on your side.

To please you, and satisfy your doubts as far as possible, I have looked into the old books,—­into Schenckius and Turner and Kenelm.  Digby and the rest, where I have found plenty of curious stories which you must take for what they are worth.

Your first question I can answer in the affirmative upon pretty good authority.  Mizaldus tells, in his “Memorabilia,” the well-known story of the girl fed on poisons, who was sent by the king of the Indies to Alexander the Great.  “When Aristotle saw her eyes sparkling and snapping like those of serpents, he said, ’Look out for yourself, Alexander! this is a dangerous companion for you!’”—­and sure enough, the young lady proved to be a very unsafe person to her friends.  Cardanus gets a story from Avicenna, of a certain man bit by a serpent, who recovered of his bite, the snake dying therefrom.  This man afterwards had a daughter whom venomous serpents could not harm, though she had a fatal power over them.