-party of Indians
captured our unlucky merchant and carried him to Montreal, there
holding him in bondage till by the payment of a heavy ransom he had
woefully subtracted from his hoard of pine-tree shillings. By his long
absence, moreover, his affairs had become so disordered that for the
rest of his life, instead of wallowing in silver, he had seldom a
sixpence-worth of copper. Doctor Cacaphodel, the alchemist, returned
to his laboratory with a prodigious fragment of granite, which he
ground to powder, dissolved in acids, melted in the crucible and burnt
with the blowpipe, and published the result of his experiments in one
of the heaviest folios of the day. And for all these purposes the gem
itself could not have answered better than the granite. The poet, by a
somewhat similar mistake, made prize of a great piece of ice which he
found in a sunless chasm of the mountains, and swore that it
corresponded in all points with his idea of the Great Carbuncle. The
critics say that, if his poetry lacked the splendor of the gem, it
retained all the coldness of the ice. The lord De Vere went back to
his ancestral hall, where he contented himself with a wax-lighted
chandelier, and filled in due course of time another coffin in the
ancestral vault. As the funeral torches gleamed within that dark
receptacle, there was no need of the Great Carbuncle to show the
vanity of earthly pomp.

The cynic, having cast aside his spectacles, wandered about the world
a miserable object, and was punished with an agonizing desire of light
for the wilful blindness of his former life. The whole night long he
would lift his splendor-blasted orbs to the moon and stars; he turned
his face eastward at sunrise as duly as a Persian idolater; he made a
pilgrimage to Rome to witness the magnificent illumination of Saint
Peter's church, and finally perished in the Great Fire of London, into
the midst of which he had thrust himself with the desperate idea of
catching one feeble ray from the blaze that was kindling earth and
heaven.

Matthew and his bride spent many peaceful years and were fond of
telling the legend of the Great Carbuncle. The tale, however, toward
the close of their lengthened lives, did not meet with the full
credence that had been accorded to it by those who remembered the
ancient lustre of the gem. For it is affirmed that from the hour when
two mortals had shown themselves so simply wise as to reject a jewel
which would have dimmed all