Here is the queer story of David William Duck, related by himself. Duck is an old man living in Aurora, Illinois, where he is universally respected. He is commonly known, however, as “Dead Duck.”
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My name is Shandy, and this is the record of my Sentimental Journey. Mr. Ames Jordan Gannett, proprietor’s son of the “York ——,” with which paper I am connected by marriage, sent me a post-card in a sealed envelope, asking me to call at a well-known restaurant in Regent Street. I was then at a well-known restaurant in Houndsditch. I put on my worst and only hat, and went. I found Mr. Gannett, at dinner, eating pease with his knife, in the manner of his countrymen.
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“Are you serious?—do you really believe that a machine thinks?”
I got no immediate reply; Moxon was apparently intent upon the coals in the grate, touching them deftly here and there with the fire-poker till they signified a sense of his attention by a brighter glow. For several weeks I had been observing in him a growing habit of delay in answering even the most trivial of commonplace questions. His air, however, was that of preoccupation rather than deliberation: one might have said that he had “something on his mind.”
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An old man named Daniel Baker, living near Lebanon, Iowa, was suspected by his neighbors of having murdered a peddler who had obtained permission to pass the night at his house.
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On the road leading north from Manchester, in eastern Kentucky, to Booneville, twenty miles away, stood, in 1862, a wooden plantation house of a somewhat better quality than most of the dwellings in that region.
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Northwestwardly from Indian Hill, about nine miles as the crow flies, is Macarger’s Gulch.
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A man stepped out of the darkness into the little illuminated circle about our failing campfire and seated himself upon a rock.
“You are not the first to explore this region,” he said, gravely.
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For there be divers sorts of death—some wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit.
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For a part of the distance between Auburn and Newcastle the road—first on one side of a creek and then on the other—occupies the whole bottom of the ravine, being partly cut out of the steep hillside, and partly built up with bowlders removed from the creek-bed by the miners.
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A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees.
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“I am not so superstitious as some of your physicians—men of science, as you are pleased to be called,” said Hawver, replying to an accusation that had not been made.
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Many years ago, on my way from Hongkong to New York, I passed a week in San Francisco. A long time had gone by since I had been in that city, during which my ventures in the Orient had prospered beyond my hope; I was rich and could afford to revisit my own country to renew my friendship with such of the companions of my youth as still lived and remembered me with the old affection.
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The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince.
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It is well known that the old Manton house is haunted.
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A Judge said to a Convicted Assassin:
“Prisoner at the bar, have you anything to say why the death-sentence should not be passed upon you?”
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A Wicked Old Man finding himself ill sent for a Physician, who prescribed for him and went away.
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Meeting a fat and patriotic Statesman on his way to Washington to beseech the President for an office, an idle Tramp accosted him and begged twenty-five cents with which to buy a suit of clothes.
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An Inoffensive Person walking in a public place was assaulted by a Stranger with a Club, and severely beaten.
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Having obtained an audience of the King an Ingenious Patriot pulled a paper from his pocket, saying:
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In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier—restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which to-day we should call indigence than impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature they abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and privations in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which they had voluntarily renounced.
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