Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/357

XXVI ] though he was twenty years older than Cuno the latter said, "I should be afraid to run a race with him, for he is as quick on his legs as the youngest man."

But it was of course the other-world stories which interested the Amsterdammers as it did the Stockholmers. Cuno writes that Swedenborg told him he had recently been in the spirit world where in a certain society a newcomer had appeared whom none of the other spirits could identify and about whom they were all very curious. They asked Swedenborg to accost the unknown and inquire about his name. Which Swedenborg obligingly did, and it was King Stanislaus of Poland.

Another time a young man to whom Cuno had given an introduction to Swedenborg mentioned that the King of Portugal had hanged the Bishop of Coimbra.

"It is not true," Swedenborg said, "the Bishop has not been hanged, or else I should have known it; only recently I spoke concerning him with the one lately deceased and I rallied the Pope on that case."

The young man hastened with this plum to a bookshop near the Stock-Exchange where, among others, Cuno was present. Most of them exclaimed that the hanging was only too true; they knew it, for had they not read it in the newspapers "with all the attendant circumstances." And one of them said that the old gentleman really was crazy, whereupon he gave a detailed account of Swedenborg's whereabouts and doings and sayings during a certain period—an account which Cuno then and there proved to be false in every vivid particular, finishing up by saying, "I am not at all willing to go security for the old gentleman to the extent that everything he tells in his writings should be believed; but I am willing to remain responsible for this statement that what I have just heard concerning him is an arrant and manifest falsehood."

But in a few days the papers retracted the news of the hanging of the Bishop of Coimbra, and, Cuno says, "the old gentleman was once again regarded as a prophet."

Swedenborg merely smiled when Cuno told him of the falsehoods circulating about him, and said, "How people will lie! In respect to the Bishop of Coimbra, other rational people besides myself, probably doubted the story. A bishop is not so easily hanged;