_ A long time ago, [Endnote: 1] in a town with which I used to be
familiarly acquainted, there dwelt an elderly person of grim aspect,
known by the name and title of Doctor Grimshawe,[Endnote: 2] whose
household consisted of a remarkably pretty and vivacious boy, and a
perfect rosebud of a girl, two or three years younger than he, and an
old maid-of-all-work, of strangely mixed breed, crusty in temper and
wonderfully sluttish in attire. [Endnote: 3] It might be partly owing to
this handmaiden's characteristic lack of neatness (though primarily, no
doubt, to the grim Doctor's antipathy to broom, brush, and dusting-
cloths) that the house--at least in such portions of it as any casual
visitor caught a glimpse of--was so overlaid with dust, that, in lack
of a visiting card, you might write your name with your forefinger upon
the tables; and so hung with cobwebs that they assumed the appearance
of dusky upholstery.
It grieves me to add an additional touch or two to the reader's
disagreeable impression of Doctor Grimshawe's residence, by confessing
that it stood in a shabby by-street, and cornered on a graveyard, with
which the house communicated by a back door; so that with a hop, skip,
and jump from the threshold, across a flat tombstone, the two children
[Endnote: 4] were in the daily habit of using the dismal cemetery as
their playground. In their graver moods they spelled out the names and
learned by heart doleful verses on the headstones; and in their merrier
ones (which were much the more frequent) they chased butterflies and
gathered dandelions, played hide-and-seek among the slate and marble,
and tumbled laughing over the grassy mounds which were too eminent for
the short legs to bestride. On the whole, they were the better for the
graveyard, and its legitimate inmates slept none the worse for the two
children's gambols and shrill merriment overhead. Here were old brick
tombs with curious sculptures on them, and quaint gravestones, some of
which bore puffy little cherubs, and one or two others the effigies of
eminent Puritans, wrought out to a button, a fold of the ruff, and a
wrinkle of the skull-cap; and these frowned upon the two children as if
death had not made them a whit more genial than they were in life. But
the children were of a temper to be more encouraged by the good-natured
smiles of the puffy cherubs, than frightened or disturbed by the sour
Puritans.
This graveyard (about which we shall say not a word more than may
sooner or later be needful) was the most ancient in the town. The clay
of the original settlers had been incorporated with the soil; those
stalwart Englishmen of the Puritan epoch, whose immediate ancestors had
been planted forth with succulent grass and daisies for the sustenance
of the parson's cow, round the low-battlemented Norman church towers in
the villages of the fatherland, had here contributed their rich Saxon
mould to tame and Christianize the wild forest earth of the new world.
In this point of view--as holding the bones and dust of the primeval
ancestor--the cemetery was more English than anything else in the
neighborhood, and might probably have nourished English oaks and
English elms, and whatever else is of English growth, without that
tendency to spindle upwards and lose their sturdy breadth, which is
said to be the ordinary characteristic both of human and vegetable
productions when transplanted hither. Here, at all events, used to be
some specimens of common English garden flowers, which could not be
accounted for,--unless, perhaps, they had sprung from some English
maiden's heart, where the intense love of those homely things, and
regret of them in the foreign land, had conspired together to keep
their vivifying principle, and cause its growth after the poor girl was
buried. Be that as it might, in this grave had been hidden from sight
many a broad, bluff visage of husbandman, who had been taught to plough
among the hereditary furrows that had been ameliorated by the crumble
of ages: much had these sturdy laborers grumbled at the great roots
that obstructed their toil in these fresh acres. Here, too, the sods
had covered the faces of men known to history, and reverenced when not
a piece of distinguishable dust remained of them; personages whom
tradition told about; and here, mixed up with successive crops of
native-born Americans, had been ministers, captains, matrons, virgins
good and evil, tough and tender, turned up and battened down by the
sexton's spade, over and over again; until every blade of grass had its
relations with the human brotherhood of the old town. A hundred and
fifty years was sufficient to do this; and so much time, at least, had
elapsed since the first hole was dug among the difficult roots of the
forest trees, and the first little hillock of all these green beds was
piled up.
Thus rippled and surged, with its hundreds of little billows, the old
graveyard about the house which cornered upon it; it made the street
gloomy, so that people did not altogether like to pass along the high
wooden fence that shut it in; and the old house itself, covering ground
which else had been sown thickly with buried bodies, partook of its
dreariness, because it seemed hardly possible that the dead people
should not get up out of their graves and steal in to warm themselves
at this convenient fireside. But I never heard that any of them did so;
nor were the children ever startled by spectacles of dim horror in the
night-time, but were as cheerful and fearless as if no grave had ever
been dug. They were of that class of children whose material seems
fresh, not taken at second hand, full of disease, conceits, whims, and
weaknesses, that have already served many people's turns, and been
moulded up, with some little change of combination, to serve the turn
of some poor spirit that could not get a better case.
So far as ever came to the present writer's knowledge, there was no
whisper of Doctor Grimshawe's house being haunted; a fact on which both
writer and reader may congratulate themselves, the ghostly chord having
been played upon in these days until it has become wearisome and
nauseous as the familiar tune of a barrel-organ. The house itself,
moreover, except for the convenience of its position close to the
seldom-disturbed cemetery, was hardly worthy to be haunted. As I
remember it, (and for aught I know it still exists in the same guise,)
it did not appear to be an ancient structure, nor one that would ever
have been the abode of a very wealthy or prominent family;--a three-
story wooden house, perhaps a century old, low-studded, with a square
front, standing right upon the street, and a small enclosed porch,
containing the main entrance, affording a glimpse up and down the
street through an oval window on each side, its characteristic was
decent respectability, not sinking below the boundary of the genteel.
It has often perplexed my mind to conjecture what sort of man he could
have been who, having the means to build a pretty, spacious, and
comfortable residence, should have chosen to lay its foundation on the
brink of so many graves; each tenant of these narrow houses crying out,
as it were, against the absurdity of bestowing much time or pains in
preparing any earthly tabernacle save such as theirs. But deceased
people see matters from an erroneous--at least too exclusive--point of
view; a comfortable grave is an excellent possession for those who need
it, but a comfortable house has likewise its merits and temporary
advantages. [Endnote: 5.]
The founder of the house in question seemed sensible of this truth, and
had therefore been careful to lay out a sufficient number of rooms and
chambers, low, ill-lighted, ugly, but not unsusceptible of warmth and
comfort; the sunniest and cheerfulest of which were on the side that
looked into the graveyard. Of these, the one most spacious and
convenient had been selected by Doctor Grimshawe as a study, and fitted
up with bookshelves, and various machines and contrivances, electrical,
chemical, and distillatory, wherewith he might pursue such researches
as were wont to engage his attention. The great result of the grim
Doctor's labors, so far as known to the public, was a certain
preparation or extract of cobwebs, which, out of a great abundance of
material, he was able to produce in any desirable quantity, and by the
administration of which he professed to cure diseases of the
inflammatory class, and to work very wonderful effects upon the human
system. It is a great pity, for the good of mankind and the advantage
of his own fortunes, that he did not put forth this medicine in pill-
boxes or bottles, and then, as it were, by some captivating title,
inveigle the public into his spider's web, and suck out its gold
substance, and himself wax fat as he sat in the central intricacy.
But grim Doctor Grimshawe, though his aim in life might be no very
exalted one, seemed singularly destitute of the impulse to better his
fortunes by the exercise of his wits: it might even have been supposed,
indeed, that he had a conscientious principle or religious scruple--
only, he was by no means a religious man--against reaping profit from
this particular nostrum which he was said to have invented. He never
sold it; never prescribed it, unless in cases selected on some
principle that nobody could detect or explain. The grim Doctor, it must
be observed, was not generally acknowledged by the profession, with
whom, in truth, he had never claimed a fellowship; nor had he ever
assumed, of his own accord the medical title by which the public chose
to know him. His professional practice seemed, in a sort, forced upon
him; it grew pretty extensive, partly because it was understood to be a
matter of favor and difficulty, dependent on a capricious will, to
obtain his services at all. There was unquestionably an odor of
quackery about him; but by no means of an ordinary kind. A sort of
mystery--yet which, perhaps, need not have been a mystery, had any one
thought it worth while to make systematic inquiry in reference to his
previous life, his education, even his native land--assisted the
impression which his peculiarities were calculated to make. He was
evidently not a New-Englander, nor a native of any part of these
Western shores. His speech was apt to be oddly and uncouthly idiomatic,
and even when classical in its form was emitted with a strange, rough
depth of utterance, that came from recesses of the lungs which we
Yankees seldom put to any use. In person, he did not look like one of
us; a broad, rather short personage, with a projecting forehead, a red,
irregular face, and a squab nose; eyes that looked dull enough in their
ordinary state, but had a faculty, in conjunction with the other
features, which those who had ever seen it described as especially ugly
and awful. As regarded dress, Doctor Grimshawe had a rough and careless
exterior, and altogether a shaggy kind of aspect, the effect of which
was much increased by a reddish beard, which, contrary to the usual
custom of the day, he allowed to grow profusely; and the wiry
perversity of which seemed to know as little of the comb as of the
razor.
We began with calling the grim Doctor an elderly personage; but in so
doing we looked at him through the eyes of the two children, who were
his intimates, and who had not learnt to decipher the purport and value
of his wrinkles and furrows and corrugations, whether as indicating
age, or a different kind of wear and tear. Possibly--he seemed so
aggressive and had such latent heat and force to throw out when
occasion called--he might scarcely have seemed middle-aged; though here
again we hesitate, finding him so stiffened in his own way, so little
fluid, so encrusted with passions and humors, that he must have left
his youth very far behind him; if indeed he ever had any.
The patients, or whatever other visitors were ever admitted into the
Doctor's study, carried abroad strange accounts of the squalor of dust
and cobwebs in which the learned and scientific person lived; and the
dust, they averred, was all the more disagreeable, because it could not
well be other than dead men's almost intangible atoms, resurrected from
the adjoining graveyard. As for the cobwebs, they were no signs of
housewifely neglect on the part of crusty Hannah, the handmaiden; but
the Doctor's scientific material, carefully encouraged and preserved,
each filmy thread more valuable to him than so much golden wire. Of all
barbarous haunts in Christendom or elsewhere, this study was the one
most overrun with spiders. They dangled from the ceiling, crept upon
the tables, lurked in the corners, and wove the intricacy of their webs
wherever they could hitch the end from point to point across the
window-panes, and even across the upper part of the doorway, and in the
chimney-place. It seemed impossible to move without breaking some of
these mystic threads. Spiders crept familiarly towards you and walked
leisurely across your hands: these were their precincts, and you only
an intruder. If you had none about your person, yet you had an odious
sense of one crawling up your spine, or spinning cobwebs in your
brain,--so pervaded was the atmosphere of the place with spider-life.
What they fed upon (for all the flies for miles about would not have
sufficed them) was a secret known only to the Doctor. Whence they came
was another riddle; though, from certain inquiries and transactions of
Doctor Grimshawe's with some of the shipmasters of the port, who
followed the East and West Indian, the African and the South American
trade, it was supposed that this odd philosopher was in the habit of
importing choice monstrosities in the spider kind from all those tropic
regions. [Endnote: 6.]
All the above description, exaggerated as it may seem, is merely
preliminary to the introduction of one single enormous spider, the
biggest and ugliest ever seen, the pride of the grim Doctor's heart,
his treasure, his glory, the pearl of his soul, and, as many people
said, the demon to whom he had sold his salvation, on condition of
possessing the web of the foul creature for a certain number of years.
The grim Doctor, according to this theory, was but a great fly which
this spider had subtly entangled in his web. But, in truth, naturalists
are acquainted with this spider, though it is a rare one; the British
Museum has a specimen, and, doubtless, so have many other scientific
institutions. It is found in South America; its most hideous spread of
legs covers a space nearly as large as a dinner-plate, and radiates
from a body as big as a door-knob, which one conceives to be an
agglomeration of sucked-up poison which the creature treasures through
life; probably to expend it all, and life itself, on some worthy foe.
Its colors, variegated in a sort of ugly and inauspicious splendor,
were distributed over its vast bulb in great spots, some of which
glistened like gems. It was a horror to think of this thing living;
still more horrible to think of the foul catastrophe, the crushed-out
and wasted poison, that would follow the casual setting foot upon it.
No doubt, the lapse of time since the Doctor and his spider lived has
already been sufficient to cause a traditionary wonderment to gather
over them both; and, especially, this image of the spider dangles down
to us from the dusky ceiling of the Past, swollen into somewhat uglier
and huger monstrosity than he actually possessed. Nevertheless, the
creature had a real existence, and has left kindred like himself; but
as for the Doctor, nothing could exceed the value which he seemed to
put upon him, the sacrifices he made for the creature's convenience, or
the readiness with which he adapted his whole mode of life, apparently,
so that the spider might enjoy the conditions best suited to his
tastes, habits, and health. And yet there were sometimes tokens that
made people imagine that he hated the infernal creature as much as
everybody else who caught a glimpse of him. [Endnote: 7.] _