"Poor devil," I said, "I should not have been so harsh with you.And you are an orphan, too, no doubt.But sit down on the floor here--nothing else can stand your weight--and besides, we cannot be sociable with you away up there above me; I want you down where I can perch on this high counting-house stool and gossip with you face to face." So he sat down on the floor, and lit a pipe which I gave him, threw one of my red blankets over his shoulders, inverted my sitz-bath on his head, helmet fashion, and made himself picturesque and comfortable.Then he crossed his ankles, while I renewed the fire, and exposed the flat, honeycombed bottoms of his prodigious feet to the grateful warmth.
"What is the matter with the bottom of your feet and the back of your legs, that they are gouged up so?""Infernal chilblains--I caught them clear up to the back of my head, roosting out there under Newell's farm.But I love the place; I love it as one loves his old home.There is no peace for me like the peace Ifeel when I am there."
We talked along for half an hour, and then I noticed that he looked tired, and spoke of it.
"Tired?" he said."Well, I should think so.And now I will tell you all about it, since you have treated me so well.I am the spirit of the Petrified Man that lies across the street there in the museum.I am the ghost of the Cardiff Giant.I can have no rest, no peace, till they have given that poor body burial again.Now what was the most natural thing for me to do, to make men satisfy this wish? Terrify them into it!
haunt the place where the body lay! So I haunted the museum night after night.I even got other spirits to help me.But it did no good, for nobody ever came to the museum at midnight.Then it occurred to me to come over the way and haunt this place a little.I felt that if I ever got a hearing I must succeed, for I had the most efficient company that perdition could furnish.Night after night we have shivered around through these mildewed halls, dragging chains, groaning, whispering, tramping up and down stairs, till, to tell you the truth, I am almost worn out.But when I saw a light in your room to-night I roused my energies again and went at it with a deal of the old freshness.But I am tired out--entirely fagged out.Give me, I beseech you, give me some hope!" I lit off my perch in a burst of excitement, and exclaimed:
"This transcends everything! everything that ever did occur! Why you poor blundering old fossil, you have had all your trouble for nothing--you have been haunting a plaster cast of yourself--the real Cardiff Giant is in Albany! --[A fact.The original fraud was ingeniously and fraudfully duplicated, and exhibited in New York as the "only genuine"Cardiff Giant (to the unspeakable disgust of the owners of the real colossus) at the very same time that the latter was drawing crowds at a museum is Albany,]-- Confound it, don't you know your own remains?"I never saw such an eloquent look of shame, of pitiable humiliation, overspread a countenance before.
The Petrified Man rose slowly to his feet, and said:
"Honestly, is that true?"
"As true as I am sitting here."
He took the pipe from his mouth and laid it on the mantel, then stood irresolute a moment (unconsciously, from old habit, thrusting his hands where his pantaloons pockets should have been, and meditatively dropping his chin on his breast); and finally said:
"Well-I never felt so absurd before.The Petrified Man has sold everybody else, and now the mean fraud has ended by selling its own ghost! My son, if there is any charity left in your heart for a poor friendless phantom like me, don't let this get out.Think how you would feel if you had made such an ass of yourself."I heard his stately tramp die away, step by step down the stairs and out into the deserted street, and felt sorry that he was gone, poor fellow--and sorrier still that he had carried off my red blanket and my bath-tub.