Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/405

1866.]

BOUT seven years ago, (it is possible that some of my readers may recall it,) the following paragraph appeared in the New York daily papers;—

.—A young man named George Snyder left the residence of his parents in Thirty-Third Street, last Friday evening without his hat and taking nothing with him but the suit which he was wearing (dark doeskin pants, and invisible-green coat), and has not yet been heard from. It is feared that he has wandered, in some sudden mental derangement, off the wharves. Any information which may lead to his discovery will be gratefully received by the distressed parents."

No information was ever received until the 1st of April last, when the missing man himself returned to his father's house, as mysteriously as he went, and was welcomed as one risen from the dead. I am that George Snyder, and propose to give now a brief account of that strange going and coming. Since April last I have been engaged, as well as the excitement of listening to the narrative of the great events which had taken place in my native land during my absence would allow me, in preparing for publication a history of my observations, made during the six years' absence; but of this history I can now give merely an outline.

On the night of my departure, November 5, 1858, I was sitting in my own room, studying Gauss's "Theoria Motus"; and, as was often the case with me, I grew so absorbed in the study as to lose all consciousness of outward things beyond the limits of the single page before me. I had forgotten the time of night,—nay, I could not have recalled the time of my life, whether I was in college or had graduated, whether I had entered on my profession or was preparing for it. My loss of the sense of space was as absolute as my loss of the sense of time, and I could not have said whether I was in my father's house in New York, or in my room in Wentworth Hall, or in my office in Jersey City. I only knew that the page, illuminated by a drop gas-light, was before me, and on it the record of that brilliant triumph of the human intellect, the deduction of a planet's entire orbit from observations of its position.

As I sat thus absorbed, my attention was partially diverted by a slight tapping, as if upon the very table upon which my book was resting. Without raising my eyes from the page, I allowed my thoughts to wander, as I inquired within myself what could have produced the noise. Could it be that I was thus suddenly "developed as a medium," and that the spirit of some departed friend wished to communicate with me? I rejected the thought instantly, for I was no believer in modern necromancy. But no sooner had I mentally decided that this was not the true explanation than I began to feel my right hand tremble in an unnatural manner, and my fingers close against my will around a pencil which I had been loosely holding. Then suddenly, upon the paper on which I had been occasionally filling out the omitted links in Gauss's mathematical reasoning, my hand, against my will, legibly scrawled, "Copernicus,"—upon which a renewed tapping was heard upon the table. I sprang out of my chair, as one startled out of sleep, and looked about the room. My full consciousness of time and place returned, and I saw nothing unusual about my apartment; there were the books, the chairs, and even the table, standing in motionless silence as usual. I concluded that my late hours and excessive concentration on my studies had made me nervous, or else that I had had a dream. I closed the book and