Humorous Ghost Stories Part 11

"It was this gentleman who returned it to me."

The races of Kheme, the races of Nahasi, all the races, black, bronze, and copper-colored, repeated in a chorus:

"The Princess Hermonthis has found her foot."

Xixouthros himself was deeply affected.

He raised his heavy eyelids, stroked his moustache, and regarded me with his glance charged with the centuries.

"By Oms, the dog of h.e.l.l, and by Tmei, daughter of the Sun and of Truth, here is a brave and worthy young man," said Pharaoh, extending toward me his scepter which terminated in a lotus flower. "What recompense do you desire?"

Eagerly, with that audacity which one has in dreams, where nothing seems impossible, I asked him for the hand of the Princess Hermonthis. Her hand in exchange for her foot, seemed to me an ant.i.thetical recompense, in sufficiently good taste.

Pharaoh opened wide his eyes of gla.s.s, surprised at my pleasantry, as well as my request.

"From what country are you, and what is your age?"

"I am a Frenchman, and I am twenty-seven years old, venerable Pharaoh."

"Twenty-seven years old! And he wishes to espouse the Princess Hermonthis, who is thirty centuries old!" exclaimed in a chorus all the thrones, and all the circles of nations.

Hermonthis alone did not seem to think my request improper.

"If you were even two thousand years old," continued the old king, "I would gladly bestow upon you the Princess; but the disproportion is too great; besides, our daughters must have husbands who will last, and you no longer know how to preserve yourselves. Of the last persons who were brought here, scarcely fifteen centuries ago, nothing now remains but a pinch of ashes. Look! my flesh is as hard as basalt, my bones are bars of steel. I shall be present on the last day, with the body and features I had in life. My daughter Hermonthis will last longer than a statue of bronze. But at that time the winds will have dissipated the last grains of your dust, and Isis herself, who knew how to recover the fragments of Osiris, would hardly be able to recompose your being. See how vigorous I still am, and how powerful is the strength of my arm," said he, shaking my hand in the English fas.h.i.+on, in a way that cut my fingers with my rings.

His grasp was so strong that I awoke, and discovered my friend Alfred, who was pulling me by the arm, and shaking me, to make me get up.

"Oh, see here, you maddening sleeper! Must I have you dragged into the middle of the street, and have fireworks put off close to your ear, in order to waken you? It is afternoon. Don't you remember that you promised to call for me and take me to see the Spanish pictures of M.

Aguada?"

"Good heavens! I forgot all about it," I answered, dressing hurriedly.

"We can go there at once--I have the permit here on my table." I crossed over to get it; imagine my astonishment when I saw, not the mummy's foot I had bought the evening before, but the little green paste image left in its place by the Princess Hermonthis!

THE RIVAL GHOSTS

BY BRANDER MATTHEWS

From _Tales of Fantasy and Fact_, by Brander Matthews. Copyright, 1886, by Harper Brothers. By permission of the publishers and Brander Matthews.

The Rival Ghosts

BY BRANDER MATTHEWS

The good s.h.i.+p sped on her way across the calm Atlantic. It was an outward pa.s.sage, according to the little charts which the company had charily distributed, but most of the pa.s.sengers were homeward bound, after a summer of rest and recreation, and they were counting the days before they might hope to see Fire Island Light. On the lee side of the boat, comfortably sheltered from the wind, and just by the door of the captain's room (which was theirs during the day), sat a little group of returning Americans. The d.u.c.h.ess (she was down on the purser's list as Mrs. Martin, but her friends and familiars called her the d.u.c.h.ess of Was.h.i.+ngton Square) and Baby Van Rensselaer (she was quite old enough to vote, had her s.e.x been ent.i.tled to that duty, but as the younger of two sisters she was still the baby of the family)--the d.u.c.h.ess and Baby Van Rensselaer were discussing the pleasant English voice and the not unpleasant English accent of a manly young lordling who was going to America for sport. Uncle Larry and Dear Jones were enticing each other into a bet on the s.h.i.+p's run of the morrow.

"I'll give you two to one she don't make 420," said Dear Jones.

"I'll take it," answered Uncle Larry. "We made 427 the fifth day last year." It was Uncle Larry's seventeenth visit to Europe, and this was therefore his thirty-fourth voyage.

"And when did you get in?" asked Baby Van Rensselaer. "I don't care a bit about the run, so long as we get in soon."

"We crossed the bar Sunday night, just seven days after we left Queenstown, and we dropped anchor off Quarantine at three o'clock on Monday morning."

"I hope we sha'n't do that this time. I can't seem to sleep any when the boat stops."

"I can, but I didn't," continued Uncle Larry, "because my stateroom was the most for'ard in the boat, and the donkey-engine that let down the anchor was right over my head."

"So you got up and saw the sun rise over the bay," said Dear Jones, "with the electric lights of the city twinkling in the distance, and the first faint flush of the dawn in the east just over Fort Lafayette, and the rosy tinge which spread softly upward, and----"

"Did you both come back together?" asked the d.u.c.h.ess.

"Because he has crossed thirty-four times you must not suppose he has a monopoly in sunrises," retorted Dear Jones. "No; this was my own sunrise; and a mighty pretty one it was too."

"I'm not matching sunrises with you," remarked Uncle Larry calmly; "but I'm willing to back a merry jest called forth by my sunrise against any two merry jests called forth by yours."

"I confess reluctantly that my sunrise evoked no merry jest at all."

Dear Jones was an honest man, and would scorn to invent a merry jest on the spur of the moment.

"That's where my sunrise has the call," said Uncle Larry, complacently.

"What was the merry jest?" was Baby Van Rensselaer's inquiry, the natural result of a feminine curiosity thus artistically excited.

"Well, here it is. I was standing aft, near a patriotic American and a wandering Irishman, and the patriotic American rashly declared that you couldn't see a sunrise like that anywhere in Europe, and this gave the Irishman his chance, and he said, 'Sure ye don't have'm here till we're through with 'em over there.'"

"It is true," said Dear Jones, thoughtfully, "that they do have some things over there better than we do; for instance, umbrellas."

"And gowns," added the d.u.c.h.ess.

"And antiquities."--this was Uncle Larry's contribution.

"And we do have some things so much better in America!" protested Baby Van Rensselaer, as yet uncorrupted by any wors.h.i.+p of the effete monarchies of despotic Europe. "We make lots of things a great deal nicer than you can get them in Europe--especially ice-cream."

"And pretty girls," added Dear Jones; but he did not look at her.

"And spooks," remarked Uncle Larry, casually.

"Spooks?" queried the d.u.c.h.ess.

"Spooks. I maintain the word. Ghost, if you like that better, or specters. We turn out the best quality of spook----"

"You forget the lovely ghost stories about the Rhine and the Black Forest," interrupted Miss Van Rensselaer, with feminine inconsistency.