't wear spectacles."

MY DOUBLE; AND HOW HE UNDID ME

By Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909)

[From _The Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1859. Republished in the
volume, _The Man Without a Country, and Other Tales_ (1868), by Edward
Everett Hale (Little, Brown & Co.).]

It is not often that I trouble the readers of _The Atlantic Monthly_.
I should not trouble them now, but for the importunities of my wife,
who "feels to insist" that a duty to society is unfulfilled, till I
have told why I had to have a double, and how he undid me. She is
sure, she says, that intelligent persons cannot understand that
pressure upon public servants which alone drives any man into the
employment of a double. And while I fear she thinks, at the bottom of
her heart, that my fortunes will never be re-made, she has a faint
hope, that, as another Rasselas, I may teach a lesson to future
publics, from which they may profit, though we die. Owing to the
behavior of my double, or, if you please, to that public pressure
which compelled me to employ him, I have plenty of leisure to write
this communication.

I am, or rather was, a minister, of the Sandemanian connection. I was
settled in the active, wide-awake town of Naguadavick, on one of the
finest water-powers in Maine. We used to call it a Western town in the
heart of the civilization of New England. A charming place it was and
is. A spirited, brave young parish had I; and it seemed as if we might
have all "the joy of eventful living" to our hearts' content.

Alas! how little we knew on the day of my ordination, and in those
halcyon moments of our first housekeeping! To be the confidential
friend in a hundred families in the town--cutting the social trifle,
as my friend Haliburton says, "from the top of the whipped-syllabub to
the bottom of the sponge-cake, which is the foundation"--to keep
abreast of the thought of the age in one's study, and to do one's best
on Sunday to interweave that thought with the active life of an active
town, and to inspirit both and make both infinite by glimpses of the
Eternal Glory, seemed such an exquisite forelook into one's life!
Enough to do, and all so real and so grand! If this vision could only
have lasted.

The truth is, that this vision was not in itself a delusion, nor,
indeed, half bright enough. If one could only have been left to do his
own business, the vision would have accomplished itself and brought
out new paraheliacal visions, each as brigh