FullReads

“You are from Massachusetts, are you not?” said he. I said I had lived in that State.

“Good State to come from,” said he. “I was there myself for three or four months,–four months and ten days precisely. Did not like it very well; did not like it. At least I liked it well enough: my wife did not like it; she could not get acquainted.”

“Does she get acquainted here?” said I, acting on a principle which I learned from Scipio Africanus at the Latin School, and so carrying the war into the enemy’s regions promptly. That is to say, I saw I must talk with this man, and I preferred to have him talk of his own concerns rather than of mine.

“O sir, I lost her,–I lost her ten years ago! Lived in New Altoona then. I married this woman the next autumn, in Vandalia. Yes, Mrs. Joslyn is very well satisfied here. She sees a good deal of society, and enjoys very good health.”

I said that most people did who were fortunate enough to have it to enjoy. But Mr. Joslyn did not understand this bitter sarcasm, far less resent it. He went on, with sufficient volubility, to give to me his impressions of the colony,–of the advantages it would derive from declaring its independence, and then from annexing itself to the United States. At the end of one of his periods, goaded again to say something, I asked why he left his own country for a “colony,” if he so greatly preferred the independent order of government.

Mr. Joslyn looked round somewhat carefully, shut the door of the room in which we were now alone,–and were likely, at that hour of the night, to be alone,–and answered my question at length, as the reader will see.

“Did you ever hear of the lost palace?” said he a little anxiously.

I said, no; that, with every year or two, I heard that Mr. Layard had found a palace at Nineveh, but that I had never heard of one’s being lost.

“They don’t tell of it, sir. Sometimes I think they do not know themselves. Does not that seem possible?” And the poor man repeated this question with such eagerness, that, in spite of my anger at being bored by him, my heart really warmed toward him. “I really think they do not know. I have never seen one word in the papers about it. Now, they would have put something in the papers,–do you not think they would? If they knew it themselves, they would.”

“Knew what?” said I, really startled out of my determination to snub him.

“Knew where the palace is,–knew how it was lost.”

By this time, of course, I supposed he was crazy. But a minute more dispelled that notion; and I beg the reader to relieve his mind from it. This man knew perfectly well what he was talking about, and never, in the whole narration, showed any symptom of mania,–a matter on which I affect to speak with the intelligence of the “experts” indeed.

After a little of this fencing with each other, in which he satisfied himself that my ignorance was not affected, he took a sudden resolution, as if it were a relief to him to tell me the whole story.

“It was years on years ago,” said he. “It was when they first had palaces.”

Still thinking of Nimrod’s palace and Priam’s, I said that must have been a great while ago.

“Yes, indeed,” said he. “You would not call them palaces now, since you have seen Pullman’s and Wagner’s. But we called them palaces then. So many looking- glasses, you know, and tapestry carpets and gold spit- boxes. Ours was the first line that run palaces.”

I asked myself, mentally, of what metal were the spit-boxes in Semiramis’s palace; but I said nothing.