Short Fiction by Herman Melville (leveled readers txt) 📕
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Melville’s pen ranges far and wide in this collection of his short stories and novellas, with subjects including a faraway mountain lodge, a magnificent rooster, a haunted table, and of course the inimitable scrivener Bartleby, whose tale is now viewed as one of the great English short stories. While his earlier novels had been well received, by this point in his career his star had waned, and it was only in the early twentieth century that his work, including these short stories, started to get the recognition it still enjoys today.
This volume collects Melville’s short stories verified to be in the U.S. public domain, in the order they were originally published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (along with “The Piazza” which was written for the collection The Piazza Tales). The racism displayed in “Benito Cereno” against the African slaves is somewhat shocking to modern readers given our greater understanding of their story, but was common in the mid-nineteenth century.
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- Author: Herman Melville
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Julia and Anna sprang to their feet.
“All well!” cried a voice from the street. It was the watchman, first ringing down his club on the pavement, and then following it up with this highly satisfactory verbal announcement.
“All well! Do you hear that, my girls?” said I, gayly.
Indeed it was astonishing how brave as Bruce I felt in company with three women, and two of them half frightened out of their wits.
I rose for my pipe, and took a philosophic smoke.
Democritus forever, thought I.
In profound silence, I sat smoking, when lo!—pop! pop! pop!—right under the table, a terrible popping.
This time we all four sprang up, and my pipe was broken.
“Good heavens! what’s that?”
“Spirits! spirits!” cried Julia.
“Oh, oh, oh!” cried Anna.
“Shame!” said my wife, “it’s that new bottled cider, in the cellar, going off. I told Biddy to wire the bottles today.”
I shall here transcribe from memoranda, kept during part of the night.
“One o’clock. No sign of the bug. Ticking continues. Wife getting sleepy.
“Two o’clock. No sign of the bug. Ticking intermittent. Wife fast asleep.
“Three o’clock. No sign of the bug. Ticking pretty steady. Julia and Anna getting sleepy.
“Four o’clock. No sign of the bug. Ticking regular, but not spirited. Wife, Julia, and Anna, all fast asleep in their chairs.
“Five o’clock. No sign of the bug. Ticking faint. Myself feeling drowsy. The rest still asleep.”
So far the journal.
—Rap! rap! rap!
A terrific, portentous rapping against a door.
Startled from our dreams, we started to our feet.
Rap! rap! rap!
Julia and Anna shrieked.
I cowered in the corner.
“You fools!” cried my wife, “it’s the baker with the bread.”
Six o’clock.
She went to throw back the shutters, but ere it was done, a cry came from Julia. There, half in and half out its crack, there wriggled the bug, flashing in the room’s general dimness, like a fiery opal.
Had this bug had a tiny sword by its side—a Damascus sword—and a tiny necklace round its neck—a diamond necklace—and a tiny gun in its claw—brass gun—and a tiny manuscript in its mouth—a Chaldee manuscript—Julia and Anna could not have stood more charmed.
In truth, it was a beautiful bug—a Jew jeweler’s bug—a bug like a sparkle of a glorious sunset.
Julia and Anna had never dreamed of such a bug. To them, bug had been a word synonymous with hideousness. But this was a seraphical bug; or rather, all it had of the bug was the B, for it was beautiful as a butterfly.
Julia and Anna gazed and gazed. They were no more alarmed. They were delighted.
“But how got this strange, pretty creature into the table?” cried Julia.
“Spirits can get anywhere,” replied Anna.
“Pshaw!” said my wife.
“Do you hear any more ticking?” said I.
They all applied their ears, but heard nothing.
“Well, then, wife and daughters, now that it is all over, this very morning I will go and make inquiries about it.”
“Oh, do, papa,” cried Julia, “do go and consult Madame Pazzi, the conjuress.”
“Better go and consult Professor Johnson, the naturalist,” said my wife.
“Bravo, Mrs. Democritus!” said I. “Professor Johnson is the man.”
By good fortune I found the professor in. Informing him briefly of the incident, he manifested a cool, collected sort of interest, and gravely accompanied me home. The table was produced, the two openings pointed out, the bug displayed, and the details of the affair set forth; my wife and daughters being present.
“And now, Professor,” said I, “what do you think of it?”
Putting on his spectacles, the learned professor looked hard at the table, and gently scraped with his penknife into the holes, but said nothing.
“Is it not an unusual thing, this?” anxiously asked Anna.
“Very unusual, Miss.”
At which Julia and Anna exchanged significant glances.
“But is it not wonderful, very wonderful?” demanded Julia.
“Very wonderful, Miss.”
My daughters exchanged still more significant glances, and Julia, emboldened, again spoke.
“And must you not admit, sir, that it is the work of—of—of sp—?”
“Spirits? No,” was the crusty rejoinder.
“My daughters,” said I, mildly, “you should remember that this is not Madame Pazzi, the conjuress, you put your questions to, but the eminent naturalist, Professor Johnson. And now, Professor,” I added, “be pleased to explain. Enlighten our ignorance.”
Without repeating all the learned gentleman said—for, indeed, though lucid, he was a little prosy—let the following summary of his explication suffice.
The incident was not wholly without example. The wood of the table was apple-tree, a sort of tree much fancied by various insects. The bugs had come from eggs laid inside the bark of the living tree in the orchard. By careful examination of the position of the hole from which the last bug had emerged, in relation to the cortical layers of the slab, and then allowing for the inch and a half along the grain, ere the bug had eaten its way entirely out, and then computing the whole number of cortical layers in the slab, with a reasonable conjecture for the number cut off from the outside, it appeared that the egg must have been laid in the tree some ninety years, more or less, before the tree could have been felled. But between the felling of the tree and the present time, how long might that be? It was a very old-fashioned table. Allow eighty years for the age of the table, which would make one hundred and fifty years that the bug had laid in the egg. Such, at least, was Professor Johnson’s computation.
“Now, Julia,” said I, “after that scientific statement of the case (though, I confess, I don’t exactly understand it) where are your spirits? It is very wonderful as it is, but where are your spirits?”
“Where, indeed?” said my wife.
“Why, now, she did not really associate this purely natural phenomenon with any crude, spiritual hypothesis, did she?” observed the learned professor, with a slight sneer.
“Say what you will,” said Julia, holding up, in the covered tumbler, the glorious, lustrous, flashing, live opal, “say what you will, if this beauteous creature be not a spirit, it yet teaches a
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