The Wonderful Story of Ravalette

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etted, praised, admired, and starved him all at once; but not one grain of true sympathy all the while; not a single spark of true disinterested friendship. The great multitude had gathered about him as city sight-seers gather round the last new novelty in the museum-a child with two heads, a dog with two tails, or the Japanese mermaid-duly

g born with a full and complete set of teeth, old gossips and venerable grey-beards augured a strange and eventful career; beside which, certain singular spectral visitations and experiences of his mother, ere, and shortly after the young eyes opened on the world, convinced her that he was born to no common destiny-much of which has already been detailed at length in "Dhoula Bel: or the Magic Globe." Two or three and twenty years prior to the opening of this tale, there lived at what then was No. 70 Canal street, New York city, a woman whose complexion was that of a Mississippi octoroon. She was a native of Vermont, had the reputation of being the most beautiful woman in the State, if indeed she was surpassed anywhere. Her mind was as rich in its stores and resources as he

such that she had become marked in community from early childhood, and her parents, looking upon her as a special providence to them, had unwisely cultured qualities in her that had better have been held in abeyance. By over-care and morbid solicitude they had nearly spoiled God's handiwork, and she grew up an imperious, self-willed, exacting, and sensitive queen. She married, and expected to find herself the centre of a realm of unalloyed joy and delight, wherein her reign would be undisputed. The man she wedded took her for her beauty, expecting to realize a perfect heaven in

ery and its fearful results. Married, she had expected to move in a sphere very far above that which, by the laws of moral and mental gravity, she was compelled to occupy. Her horizon was henceforth to be bounded by that of her master and his associates. Her husband was vain of his conquest, and one of his greatest joys was found in parading and showing off her beauty to the best advantage, like a

real life in the phantom land. True to the natural instinct of the human heart, just in proportion as she withdrew from the world, so did she approach that awful veil which is only uplifted for the sons and daughters of sorrow and the starbeam. She became a seeress, a dreamer, and, in what to her was an actual, positive communion with the lordly ghosts of the dead nations, whereof, in both lines, her forefathers had been chiefs, she sought that sympathy in her sorrows, and in her strange internal joys-that mysterious balm of healing, which the red ma

child, and that child the man of these volumes-in the very midst o

ecame re-incarnate in the son she bore; and with it she endowed the child with her own intense desire to love and be loved; all her mystic spirit, her love of mystery; all her unearthly aspiration

hope of speedy death, all the while grasping existence with ten-fold the tenacity of others, yet daily pleading for life-strange contradiction!-dear life, at the world's stern bar; pleading daily, yet as ofte

emarkable degree. As throwing some light on the character of this man-who is not a myth, but an actual existence-I will here repeat the substance of an account himself gave of

and that house was a long way out of town. It still stands in the same place, but the city has grown miles beyond it. The building, in times of pestilence, fever, smallpox, and chol

named Banker, who cursed and swore at one of them on a certain occasion, whereupon the ghost slapped his face, and completely turned and withered his lower jaw by way of punishment for the leze majeste. With this exception, those who met one of these ghosts, invariably had urgent business in an opposite direction, and it was quite surprising with what

, who have not died, but who, nevertheless, are of so fine texture as to defy the material laws which we are compelled to obey, and who, coming under the operation of those that govern disembodied men, are enabled to do all that they do. VI. I believe that human beings, by the action of desperate, wicked wills, frequently call into being spectral harpies-the horrible embodiment of their evil thoughts. These are demons,

enting Death. Ah! what a shock was that to my poor little childish heart! She had that morning grown weary of earth, had serenely, trustingly closed her darling eyes, and I was left alone to battle sin

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learned as she was beautiful. Kings and princes sought her hand in vain; for her father had sworn to give her to no man save him who should solve a riddle which the king himself would propound, and solve it at the first trial, under penalty of decapitation on failure. The

that robes of crimson, chains of gold, the first place in the

as a young Basinge poet, who acted as interpreter to the embassy. This youth heard of the singular state of things, learned the conditions, and got the riddle by h

o watch him, and did so. Now, poets must sing, and this one was particularly addicted to that sort of exercise; and he made it a point to imagine all sorts of perfections as residing in the princess, and he sung his songs daily in the g

diet, are not comparable to many other things; and, as this co

and more lovely than the flowers that bloomed in the king's garden. He also thought he saw an inscription, which bade him despair not, but TRY! and, at the same time, there flowed into his mind this sentence, which subsequently became the watchword of the mystic fraternity which, for some cent

e closet of the king, and there still further poisoned the mind of his master against the victor, by charging him with having succeeded through the aid of sorcery, which so enraged the king that he readily agreed to remove the claimant by means of a speedy, secret, and cruel death that very night, to which end the poet was drugged in his wine at the evening banquet, conveyed to a couch openly, and almost immediately thereafter removed to the chamber allotted to the refractory servants of the court. This apartment was under ground, and the youth, being thrown violently on the floor, revived, and was astonished to find himself bound hand and foot in presence of the king, his vizier, a few soldiers, and-death; for he saw at a glance that his days were numbered. He defended himself from the charge of sorcery, but in vain. He was doomed to die, and the order given, when, just as the blow was about to fall, there appeared the semblance of a gigantic hand, moving as if to stay the uplifted blade; but too late. The sword fell, and, as it reached the neck of the victim, he uttered the awful words,

f ages. I know the fate impending over me, and that in this my present form I am a neutral being, for whom there is no hope save through the union of myself, a son of Adam's race, with a daughter of Ish, one not of