perience a physical
sickness of the stomach, whenever I glance at them on the table. I tell
you there is a demon in them! I anticipate a wild enjoyment in seeing
them in the blaze; such as I should feel in taking vengeance on an
enemy, or destroying something noxious."

I did not very strenuously oppose this determination, being privately
of opinion, in spite of my partiality for the author, that his tales
would make a more brilliant appearance in the fire than anywhere else.
Before proceeding to execution, we broached the bottle of champagne,
which Oberon had provided for keeping up his spirits in this doleful
business. We swallowed each a tumblerful, in sparkling commotion; it
went bubbling down our throats, and brightened my eyes at once, but
left my friend sad and heavy as before. He drew the tales towards him,
with a mixture of natural affection and natural disgust, like a father
taking a deformed infant into his arms.

"Pooh! Pish! Pshaw!" exclaimed he, holding them at arm's-length. "It
was Gray's idea of heaven, to lounge on a sofa and read new novels.
Now, what more appropriate torture would Dante himself have contrived,
for the sinner who perpetrates a bad book, than to be continually
turning over the manuscript?"

"It would fail of effect," said I, "because a bad author is always his
own great admirer."

"I lack that one characteristic of my tribe,--the only desirable one,"
observed Oberon. "But how many recollections throng upon me, as I turn
over these leaves! This scene came into my fancy as I walked along a
hilly road, on a starlight October evening; in the pure and bracing
air, I became all soul, and felt as if I could climb the sky, and run a
race along the Milky Way. Here is another tale, in which I wrapt myself
during a dark and dreary night-ride in the month of March, till the
rattling of the wheels and the voices of my companions seemed like
faint sounds of a dream, and my visions a bright reality. That
scribbled page describes shadows which I summoned to my bedside at
midnight: they would not depart when I bade them; the gray dawn came,
and found me wide awake and feverish, the victim of my own
enchantments!"

"There must have been a sort of happiness in all this," said I, smitten
with a strange longing to make proof of it.

"There may be happiness in a fever fit," replied the author. "And then
the various moods in which I wrote! Sometimes my ideas were like
precious stones under the earth,