By those of my friends who happen
to know that I sometimes amuse myself with hypnotism,
mind reading and kindred phenomena, I am frequently
asked if I have a clear conception of the nature of
whatever principle underlies them. To this question
I always reply that I neither have nor desire to have.
I am no investigator with an ear at the key-hole
of Nature’s workshop, trying with vulgar curiosity
to steal the secrets of her trade. The interests
of science are as little to me as mine seem to have
been to science.
Doubtless the phenomena in question
are simple enough, and in no way transcend our powers
of comprehension if only we could find the clew; but
for my part I prefer not to find it, for I am of a
singularly romantic disposition, deriving more gratification
from mystery than from knowledge. It was commonly
remarked of me when I was a child that my big blue
eyes appeared to have been made rather to look into
than look out of such was their dreamful
beauty, and in my frequent periods of abstraction,
their indifference to what was going on. In
those peculiarities they resembled, I venture to think,
the soul which lies behind them, always more intent
upon some lovely conception which it has created in
its own image than concerned about the laws of nature
and the material frame of things. All this, irrelevant
and egotistic as it may seem, is related by way of
accounting for the meagreness of the light that I
am able to throw upon a subject that has engaged so
much of my attention, and concerning which there is
so keen and general a curiosity. With my powers
and opportunities, another person might doubtless
have an explanation for much of what I present simply
as narrative.
My first knowledge that I possessed
unusual powers came to me in my fourteenth year, when
at school. Happening one day to have forgotten
to bring my noon-day luncheon, I gazed longingly at
that of a small girl who was preparing to eat hers.
Looking up, her eyes met mine and she seemed unable
to withdraw them. After a moment of hesitancy
she came forward in an absent kind of way and without
a word surrendered her little basket with its tempting
contents and walked away. Inexpressibly pleased,
I relieved my hunger and destroyed the basket.
After that I had not the trouble to bring a luncheon
for myself: that little girl was my daily purveyor;
and not infrequently in satisfying my simple need
from her frugal store I combined pleasure and profit
by constraining her attendance at the feast and making
misleading proffer of the viands, which eventually
I consumed to the last fragment. The girl was
always persuaded that she had eaten all herself; and
later in the day her tearful complaints of hunger
surprised the teacher, entertained the pupils, earned
for her the sobriquet of Greedy-Gut and filled me
with a peace past understanding.
A disagreeable feature of this otherwise
satisfactory condition of things was the necessary
secrecy: the transfer of the luncheon, for example,
had to be made at some distance from the madding crowd,
in a wood; and I blush to think of the many other
unworthy subterfuges entailed by the situation.
As I was (and am) naturally of a frank and open disposition,
these became more and more irksome, and but for the
reluctance of my parents to renounce the obvious advantages
of the new regime I would gladly have reverted to
the old. The plan that I finally adopted to
free myself from the consequences of my own powers
excited a wide and keen interest at the time, and that
part of it which consisted in the death of the girl
was severely condemned, but it is hardly pertinent
to the scope of this narrative.
For some years afterward I had little
opportunity to practice hypnotism; such small essays
as I made at it were commonly barren of other recognition
than solitary confinement on a bread-and-water diet;
sometimes, indeed, they elicited nothing better than
the cat-o’-nine-tails. It was when I was
about to leave the scene of these small disappointments
that my one really important feat was performed.
I had been called into the warden’s
office and given a suit of civilian’s clothing,
a trifling sum of money and a great deal of advice,
which I am bound to confess was of a much better quality
than the clothing. As I was passing out of the
gate into the light of freedom I suddenly turned and
looking the warden gravely in the eye, soon had him
in control.
“You are an ostrich,” I said.
At the post-mortem examination the
stomach was found to contain a great quantity of indigestible
articles mostly of wood or metal. Stuck fast
in the esophagus and constituting, according to the
Coroner’s jury, the immediate cause of death,
one door-knob.
I was by nature a good and affectionate
son, but as I took my way into the great world from
which I had been so long secluded I could not help
remembering that all my misfortunes had flowed like
a stream from the niggard economy of my parents in
the matter of school luncheons; and I knew of no reason
to think they had reformed.
On the road between Succotash Hill
and South Asphyxia is a little open field which once
contained a shanty known as Pete Gilstrap’s Place,
where that gentleman used to murder travelers for a
living. The death of Mr. Gilstrap and the diversion
of nearly all the travel to another road occurred
so nearly at the same time that no one has ever been
able to say which was cause and which effect.
Anyhow, the field was now a desolation and the Place
had long been burned. It was while going afoot
to South Asphyxia, the home of my childhood, that I
found both my parents on their way to the Hill.
They had hitched their team and were eating luncheon
under an oak tree in the center of the field.
The sight of the luncheon called up painful memories
of my school days and roused the sleeping lion in
my breast. Approaching the guilty couple, who
at once recognized me, I ventured to suggest that I
share their hospitality.
“Of this cheer, my son,”
said the author of my being, with characteristic pomposity,
which age had not withered, “there is sufficient
for but two. I am not, I hope, insensible to
the hunger-light in your eyes, but ”
My father has never completed that
sentence; what he mistook for hunger-light was simply
the earnest gaze of the hypnotist. In a few
seconds he was at my service. A few more sufficed
for the lady, and the dictates of a just resentment
could be carried into effect. “My former
father,” I said, “I presume that it is
known to you that you and this lady are no longer
what you were?”
“I have observed a certain subtle
change,” was the rather dubious reply of the
old gentleman; “it is perhaps attributable to
age.”
“It is more than that,”
I explained; “it goes to character to
species. You and the lady here are, in truth,
two broncos wild stallions both, and unfriendly.”
“Why, John,” exclaimed
my dear mother, “you don’t mean to say
that I am ”
“Madam,” I replied, solemnly,
fixing my eyes again upon hers, “you are.”
Scarcely had the words fallen from
my lips when she dropped upon her hands and knees,
and backing up to the old man squealed like a demon
and delivered a vicious kick upon his shin! An
instant later he was himself down on all-fours, headed
away from her and flinging his feet at her simultaneously
and successively. With equal earnestness but
inferior agility, because of her hampering body-gear,
she plied her own. Their flying legs crossed
and mingled in the most bewildering way; their feet
sometimes meeting squarely in midair, their bodies
thrust forward, falling flat upon the ground and for
a moment helpless. On recovering themselves
they would resume the combat, uttering their frenzy
in the nameless sounds of the furious brutes which
they believed themselves to be the whole
region rang with their clamor! Round and round
they wheeled, the blows of their feet falling “like
lightnings from the mountain cloud.” They
plunged and reared backward upon their knees, struck
savagely at each other with awkward descending blows
of both fists at once, and dropped again upon their
hands as if unable to maintain the upright position
of the body. Grass and pebbles were torn from
the soil by hands and feet; clothing, hair, faces
inexpressibly defiled with dust and blood. Wild,
inarticulate screams of rage attested the delivery
of the blows; groans, grunts and gasps their receipt.
Nothing more truly military was ever seen at Gettysburg
or Waterloo: the valor of my dear parents in
the hour of danger can never cease to be to me a source
of pride and gratification. At the end of it
all two battered, tattered, bloody and fragmentary
vestiges of mortality attested the solemn fact that
the author of the strife was an orphan.
Arrested for provoking a breach of
the peace, I was, and have ever since been, tried
in the Court of Technicalities and Continuances whence,
after fifteen years of proceedings, my attorney is
moving heaven and earth to get the case taken to the
Court of Remandment for New Trials.
Such are a few of my principal experiments
in the mysterious force or agency known as hypnotic
suggestion. Whether or not it could be employed
by a bad man for an unworthy purpose I am unable to
say.