Besides, who can draw
the limits around the region of possibility? Every day we see the range
of reality extending more widely. Unseen and unknown influences,
marvellous correspondences, invisible bonds, some kind of mysterious
magnetism, are, on the one hand, proclaimed as undoubted facts, and
denied on the other with irony and scepticism, and yet who can say that
after a while there will not be some astonishing revelations breaking in
in the midst of us all when we least expect it? In the midst of so much
ignorance it seems easy to lay a claim to wisdom and shrewdness.
I therefore only begged Sperver to moderate his anger, and by no means to
fire upon the Black Plague, warning him that such a proceeding would
bring serious misfortune upon him.
"Pooh!" he cried; "at the very worst they could but hang me."
But that, I remarked, was a good deal for an honest man to suffer.
"Not at all," he cried; "it is but one kind of death out of many. You are
suffocated, that is all. I would just as soon die of that as of a hammer
falling on my head, as in apoplexy, or not to be able to sleep, or smoke,
or swallow, or digest my food.
Pages:
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32