Page:Unto the Third and Fourth Generation.pdf/10

 bring myself to hand it to the clerk. At length I tore it up, and hurriedly left the office.

It was just as if it had been Lucy's death warrant, and I could not deliver it. I could not give her up. I would not abandon hope of her. The thought of that beautiful young life being slowly encircled as by a serpent that was to destroy it was too horrible. Some angel there must be in God's world to slay this demon, if I could only find it out.

It was Saturday night, and the streets were thronged. I walked aimlessly along until I found myself in front of a place of popular entertainment, which had a gigantic placard on the face of it. The placard announced that, at half past ten that night, a certain Dr. La Mothe, a hypnotist, would awaken a man who had been lying ten days in a trance. In sheer weariness of soul, and only with a desire for distraction from painful thoughts, I went in to see what there was to be seen.

It was still an hour earlier than the time appointed for the experiment, but I found my way to the sleeper. He was kept in a small room apart, and lay in a casket, which at first sight suggested a coffin. There were raised platforms at either side, from which the spectator looked down at the man as into a grave. But nothing in his own appearance gave any hint of death. His face was composed and healthful; his eyes were closed, his lips lightly pressed together, his breathing was noiseless, and his breast rose and fell with the gentlest motion. The sleep of a child was never more soft and sweet and peaceful.

I was alone in the room, and I could not leave it. Here was a great and wondrous power—sleep. It had wiped out ten days of this man's life—ten days, perhaps, of sorrow and pain. The world had gone by him and left no mark. His temptations, his troubles, his besetting sins, they had touched him not.

Oh, sleep it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole. To Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from heaven That slid into my soul.

I sit on a chair on the platform, and looked down at the sleeper. And as I looked it seemed at last that it was not a strange man's face I was gazing into, but the beautiful face that was the dearest to me in all the world. Suddenly a thought struck me that made me quiver from head to foot. What if Lucy could sleep through the days of her awful temptation! What if she could be put into a trance when the craving was coming upon her! Would she bridge over the time of the attack? Would she elude the relentless fiend that was pursuing her? Would she awake with the burning fever gone?

The hour of the experiment arrived, and spectators came trooping into the room. They were chiefly fashionable young men with their women, and they chatted and laughed, and smoked their cigars, throughout the proceedings. The hypnotist was a man of five and thirty, with prepossessing manners, a clear cut face, and a heary chin, but a smile like sunshine, and a voice that was at once sharp and caressing. He pressed the brows of the sleeper, opened his eyes and blew into them, then called to him, and he awoke. In less than sixty seconds the man, who had lain ten days asleep, dead to himself and to all knowledge of life, had vaulted lightly out of the casket and was putting on his coat.

I stepped down and spoke to him. “Are you hungry?” I asked.

“No, sir,” he answered.

“Nor thirsty?”

“No.”

“You feel quite well?”

“Quite.”

I followed the hypnotist into his retiring room. “Dr. La Mothe,” I said, “has artificial sleep ever been used for the cure of intemperance?”

He was a Parisian, and I had to repeat my question in French. “In the school of Nancy,” he said, “the cure of alcoholism by suggestion is not unknown.”

“That is more than I meant. You know the form of mania in which the crave is periodical?”

“Certainly.”

“Do you think if a patient were put under artificial sleep when the period is approaching, and kept there as long as it is usual for it to last, the crave would be past and gone when the time came to awaken him?”

I could see that the idea had never occurred to the hypnotist before, and that it startled and fascinated him. “With a proper subject it might be—I cannot say—I think it would—at any rate, I should like to try.

Before leaving him I had arranged everything. He was to hold himself in readiness to go with me to Cumberland at any moment that I might summon him on that errand.

Is it too much to say that I went home that night with the swing and step of a man