Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 118: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

something were to be “revealed” to me by this deliberate process of slow matcrialization which had been progressing for the last week or so, then it might as well be for some good and useful purpose. I might be, in a sense, the agent of Providence! If it were otherwise; if it were the evil work of some discarnate spirit, or something of the sort, well, every Sunday since my child- hood, in church, I had recited the Creed, and so admitted, along with the clergy and the rest of the congregation, that God our Father had created all things,—visible and invisible! If it were this part of His creation at work, for any purpose, then He was stronger than they. I said a brief prayer before: turning off that light, and put my trust in Him. It may appear to some a bit! old-lashioned,—even Victorian! But He does not change along with the cur-' rent fashions of human thought about Him, and this “human thought,” and “the modern mind,” and all the rest of it, does not mean the vast, the over- whelming majority of people. It involves only a few dozen prideful “intellec- tuals’” at best, or worst! I switched off the light, and, already clearer, I saw what must have been Old Morris, getting into bed. I had interviewed old Mr. Bonesteel, the chief government surveyor, a pen- tleman of parts and much experience, a West Indian born on this island. Mr. Bonesteel, in response to my guarded enquiries,—for I had, of course, already suspected Old Morris; was not my house still called his?—had stated that he remembered Old Morris well, in his own remote youth. His description of that personage and this apparition tallied. This, undoubtedly, was Old Morris, That it was someone, was apparent. I felt, somehow, rather relieved to realize that it was he. I knew something about him, you see. Mr. Bonestecl had given me a good description and many anecdotes, quite freely, and as though he enjoyed being called on for information about one of the old-timers like Morris. He had been more reticent, guarded, in fact, when I pressed him for details of Morris’ end. That there had been some obscurity,—intentional or otherwise, I could never ascertain,—about the old man, I had already known. Such casual enquiries as I had made on other occasions through natural in terest in the person whose name still clung to my house sixty years or more since he had lived in it, had never got me anywhere. I had only gathered what Mr. Bonesteel’s more ample account corroborated: that Morris had been ec- centric, in some ways, amusingly so. That he had been extraordinarily well- to-do. That he gave occasional large parties, which, contrary to the custom of the hospitable island of St. Croix, were always required to come to a con- clusion well before midnight. Why, there was a story of Old Morris almost literally getting rid of a few reluctant guests, by one device or another, from these parties, a circumstance on which hinged several of the amusing anec- dotes of that eccentric person! Old Morris, as I knew, had not always lived on St. Croix. His youth had been spent in Martinique, in the then smaller and less Important town of Fort-de-France. That, of course, was many years before the terrific calamity of the destruction of St. Pierre had taken place, by the eruption of Mt. Pelée. Old Morris, coming to St. Croix in young middle age,—forty-five or there abouts,—had already been accounted a rich man. He had been engaged in no 116 comicbooks.com ~