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Page 46
"That will do very well, doctor; but don't you think you are a little
severe on Adam?" I said.
"I have no sympathies with Adam. Not that I ever blamed him for his
weakness in the apple incident; but I do blame him for his garrulity,
and his paltry cowardice in exposing Eve. Eve was an instinctive
agnostic--and she didn't purpose to be anybody's slave. If Adam decided
to keep up with the procession, as he at first did decide to do, he had
no business to whine over the outcome. I'd wager freely that Eve earned
the living after the pair left paradise. Cain took after his mother; and
I hazard the opinion that Eve was in sympathy with Cain in the Abel
episode--that is, after the tragedy. Eve and Cain had the best of
everything all the way through, for they acted in harmony with their
feelings; whilst poor old feeble, vacillating Adam tried to use his
worthless old brain-box, and the natural consequence ensued. His
feelings, which constituted the strongest part of his mind, were always
in conflict with his intellect, which was just strong enough to get him
into trouble when a pure out-and-out unreasoning animal would have been
safe; and he never had enough will properly to correct an error when he
did see it."
We laughed over this conceit of Castleton's, and Bainbridge said:
"Speaking of biblical characters, I have thought that Moses would, with
even slight literary training, have far surpassed the modern writer of
adventure-fiction. His style may be open to adverse criticism, but his
originality is beyond question. If he left any material for a purely
original story, I fail to detect it. He gave to literature the
sea-story, the war-story, and the love-story--stories that hinge on all
the human passions, and stories of the supernatural in all its phases.
He first presented to a world innocent of fiction-literature the giant
and the dwarf; the brave man, the strong man, and the man of supreme
fortitude; the honest man, the truthful king, and the woman that knows
how to wait for the man she loves; voices in the air, signs in the
sky--in short, everything. Even poor old Aesop wasn't in time to grasp a
reputation for originality. The modern story-teller may combine, extend,
and elaborate; but all opportunity for a display of invention seems to
be forever barred."
"By the bye, doctor," said Castleton, evidently impatient at his
enforced silence whilst another spoke, "do any of your volcanoes or
mountains in Hili-li blow up?"
"No, sir," answered Bainbridge, with dignity.
"Well, if I had been Pym I should have blown those mountains into the
Antarctic Ocean," said Castleton. "I understand from the words that I
caught this evening as I entered here that your heroine is safe; but if
I had been Pym, I should have taken no risks. I should have sent your
madman word to return the girl, or take the consequences--the
consequences being that I should have blown him and the entire mountain
into the mighty deep. 'Sir,' I should have said, 'return the lady, or I
will annihilate you.' And so I should have done, if a hair of her head
had been harmed.--By the bye, gentlemen, I believe you never heard of my
invention for stopping war, did you?" We intimated that we had thus far
been deprived of that pleasure. I saw that one of his peculiar outbursts
was at hand--one of those apparently serious, though, I thought,
intentionally humorous sallies, so puzzling coming from a man of
Castleton's intellectual attainments, and the mental _primum mobile_ of
which I had already been much interested in trying to determine.
"Well, gentlemen," he continued, "it was about fourteen years ago,
during the dark days of The War"--he referred to the great rebellion in
the United States, which began in 1861, and which it required the
existing government about four years to suppress. "It was during the
period when our great President was most worried. I had thought the
matter over--as I always do think over vast questions, from the
standpoint of true greatness. 'Why not,' I mentally soliloquized, 'why
not end this matter at a blow? 'As I drove about through our retired
roads and lanes, I gave the subject my very best attention. I thought to
myself how the present system of the universe depends upon what we term
the luminiferous ether; of the perfect elasticity and inexpansibility of
that ether; of what its nature must be. I concluded that no ultimate
particle of it--as with matter no atom--is ever added to or removed from
the universe. Now, if we could succeed in removing from this
inexpansible, universal ocean of ether even the most ultimate portion,
there would be a literal vacuum with nothing to fill it, and the
equilibrium of the universe would be destroyed. Now, gentlemen, is or is
not this supposition logical?"
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