The Ghost of Dr Harris - Nathaniel Hawthorne

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The Ghost of Dr. Harris.

By Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I'm afraid this ghost story will bear a very faded aspect when transferred to paper.

Whatever affected had on you, whatever charm it retains in your memory

is perhaps to be attributed to the favorable circumstances under which it was originally told.

We were sitting, I remember, late in the evening in your drawing room,

where the lights of the chandelier were so muckled as to produce a delicious obscurity,

through which the fire diffused a dim red glow.

In this rich twilight, the feelings of the party had been properly attuned

by some tales of English superstitioned.

And the lady of Smith Hills Hall had just been describing them,

bloody footsteps, which marks the threshold of her old mansion.

When your Yankee guest, zealous for the honor of his country and desirous approving that his dead compatriots

have the same ghostly privileges as other dead people, if they think it worthwhile to use them,

began a story of something wonderful that long ago happened to himself.

Possibly in the verbal narrative, he may have assumed a little more license

than would be allowed in a written record for the sake of the artistic effect.

He may then have thrown in, here and there, a few slight circumstances

which he will not think it proper to retain in what he now puts forth as the sober statement of a veritable fact.

A good many years ago, it must be as many as 15, perhaps more,

and while I was still a bachelor, I resided at Boston and the United States.

In that city, there is a large and long established library,

styled the Athenaeum, connected with which is the reading room,

well supplied with foreign and American periodicals and newspapers.

A splendid edifice has since been erected by the priors of the institution,

but at the period I speak of, it was contained within a large old mansion,

formerly the town residents of an imminent citizen of Boston.

The reading room, a spacious hall with a group of the Laocca on at one end

and the Belvedere Apollo at the other, was frequented by not a few elderly merchants,

retired from business, by clergymen and lawyers, and by such literary men as we had amongst us.

These good people were mostly old, leisurely, insomnelant,

and used to nod and doze for hours together with the newspapers before them,

ever in a non-recovering themselves so far as to read a word or two of the politics of the day,

sitting as it were on the boundary of the land of dreams and having little to do with this world,

except through the newspapers which they so tenaciously grasped.

One of these wordies, whom I occasionally saw there, was the Reverend Dr. Harris,

a unitarian clergyman of considerable repute and eminence.

He was very far advanced in life, no less than 80 years old, and probably more.

And he resided, I think, at Dorchester, a suburban village in the immediate vicinity of Boston.

I had never been personally acquainted with the good old clergymen,

but had heard of him all of my life as a noteworthy man,

so that when he was first pointed out to me, I looked at him with a certain specialty of attention,

and always subsequently eyed him with a degree of interest whenever I happened to see him at the Athenium or elsewhere.

He was a small, withered, and firm, but brisk old gentleman, with snow-white hair, a somewhat stooping figure,

but yet a remarkable alacrity of movement.

I remember it was in the street when I first noticed him.

The doctor was plotting along with the staff, but turned smartly about on being addressed by the gentleman who was with me,

and responded with a good deal of evacity.

Who is he, I inquired, as soon as he had passed?

The Reverend Dr. Harris of Dorchester replied my companion,

and from that time, I often saw him, and never forgot his aspect.

His special haunt was the Athenium.

There I used to see him daily, and almost always with the newspaper, the Boston Post,

which was the leading journal of the Democratic Party in the Northern States.

As old Dr. Harris had been a noted Democrat during his more active life,

it was a very natural thing that he should still like to read the Boston Post.

There, his Reverend figure was accustomed to sit day after day in the self-same chair by the fireside,

and by degrees, seeing him there so constantly, I began to look towards him as I entered the reading room,

and felt that a kind of acquaintance, at least on my part, was established.

Not that I had any reason, as long as this venerable person remained in the body,

to suppose that he had ever noticed me, but by some subtle connection,

the small, white-haired, and firm, yet vivacious figure of an old clergyman,

became associated with my idea and recollection of the place.

One day, especially, about noon, as was generally his hour,

I am perfectly certain that I had seen this figure, whole Dr. Harris,

and taken my customary note of him, although I remember nothing in his appearance

at all different from what I had seen on many previous occasions.

But that very evening, a friend said to me,

Did you hear that old Dr. Harris is dead?

No, I said, very quietly, and it cannot be true, for I saw him at the Athenium today.

You must be mistaken, rejoin my friend.

He is certainly dead, and confirmed the fact with such special circumstance

that I could no longer doubt it.

My friend has often since assured me that I seemed much startled at the intelligence,

but, as well as I can recollect, I believe that I was very little disturbed,

if at all, but set down the apparition as a mistake of my own,

or perhaps the interposition of a familiar idea into the place

and amid the circumstances, with which I had been accustomed to associate it.

The next day, as I ascended the steps of the Athenium,

I remember thinking within myself,

Well, I never shall see old Dr. Harris again.

With this thought in my mind, as I opened the door of the reading room,

I glanced towards the spot and share where Dr. Harris usually sat,

and there, to my astonishment, sat the gray and firm figure of the deceased doctor,

reading the newspaper, as was his want.

His own death must have been recorded that very morning, in that very newspaper.

I have no recollection of being greatly discomposed at the moment,

nor, indeed, that I felt any extraordinary motion, whatever.

Probably, if ghosts were in the habit of coming among us,

they would coincide with the ordinary train of affairs,

and melt into them so familiarly that we should not be shocked at their presence.

At all events, so it was, in this instance.

I looked through the newspapers, as usual,

and turned over the periodicals,

taking about as much interest in their contents,

as at other times.

Once or twice no doubt, I may have lifted my eyes from the page to look again at the venerable doctor,

who ought then to have been lying in his coffin,

dressed out for the grave, but who felt such interest in the Boston Post

has to come back from the other world to read it in the morning after his death.

One might have, suppose, that he would have cared more about the novelties or the sphere,

to which he had just been introduced, than about the politics he had left behind him.

The apparition took no notice of me, nor behaved otherwise in any respect that on any previous day.

Nobody but myself seemed to notice him,

and yet the old gentleman round about the fire, beside his chair,

were his lifelong acquaintances, who were perhaps thinking of his death,

and who, in a day or two, would deem it a proper courtesy to attend his funeral.

I have forgotten how the ghost of Dr. Harris took its departure from the Athenaeum on this occasion,

or in fact, whether the ghost or I went first.

This equanimity, and almost indifference in my part,

the careless way in which I glanced at so singular a mystery and left it aside,

this would now surprise me as much as anything else in the affair.

From that time, for a long while thereafter, for weeks at least, and I know not, but for months,

I used to see the figure of Dr. Harris quite as frequently as before his death.

It grew to be so common that at length I regarded the venerable defunct,

no more than any other of the old thogies,

who bashed before the fire and dosed over the newspapers.

It was but a ghost, nothing but thin air,

not tangible nor appreciable, nor demanding any attention from a man of flesh and blood.

I cannot recollect any cold shudderings, any awe, any repugnance, any emotion whatsoever,

such as would be suitable and decorous on beholding a visitant from the spiritual world.

It is very strange, but such is the truth.

It appears excessively odd to me now that I did not adopt such means as I readily might,

to ascertain whether the appearance had solid substance or was merely gaseous and vapory.

I might have brushed against him, have jostled his chair,

or have trodden accidentally on his poor old toes.

I might have snatched the Boston Post, unless that were an apparition, too, out of his shadowy hands.

I might have tested him in a hundred ways, but I did nothing of the kind.

Perhaps I was lost to destroy the illusion, and to rob myself so good of a ghost story,

which might probably have been explained in some very commonplace way.

Perhaps, after all, I had a secret dread of the old phenomenon,

and therefore kept within my limits with an instinctive caution which I must took for indifference.

But this, as it may, here is the fact.

I saw the figure day after day, for a considerable space of time,

and took no pains to ascertain whether it was a ghost or no.

I never, to my knowledge, saw him come into the reading room or depart from it.

There sat Dr. Harrison's customary chair, and I can say a little else about him.

After a certain period, I really know not how long.

I began to notice, or to fancy, a peculiar regard in the old gentleman's aspect towards myself,

I sometimes found him gazing at me, and, unless I deceived myself,

there was a sort of expectancy in his face.

His spectacles, I think, were shoved up, so that his bleared eyes might meet my own.

Had he been a living man, I should have flattered myself that good Dr. Harris was,

for some reason or other, interested in me, and desirous of a personal acquaintance,

being a ghost, and, amenable to ghostly laws,

it was natural to conclude that he was waiting to be spoken to before delivering whatever message he wished to impart.

But, if so, the ghost had shown the bad judgment common among the spiritual brotherhood.

Both is regarded the place of interview, and the person whom he had selected as the recipient of his communications.

In the reading room of the Athenaeum conversation is strictly forbidden,

and I could not have addressed the apparition without drawing the instant notice and indignant frowns

of the slumberous old gentleman around me.

I myself, too, at that time, was as shy as any ghost, and followed the ghost's rule never to speak first.

And what an absurd figure should I have made, solemnly and awfully addressing what must have appeared

in the eyes of all the rest of the company, an empty chair.

Besides, I had never been introduced to Dr. Harris, dead or alive,

and I am not aware that social regulations are to be abrogated by the accidental fact of one of the parties

having crossed the imperceptible line which separates the other party from the spiritual world.

If ghosts throw off all conventionalism among themselves,

it is not therefore followed that it can be safely dispensed with by those who are still hampered with flesh and blood.

For such reasons as these, and reflecting moreover that the deceased's doctor might burden me

with some disagreeable task, with which I had no business nor wish to be concerned,

I stubbornly resolved to have nothing to say to him.

To this determination, I adhered, and not have still will ever pass between the ghost and Dr. Harris and myself.

To the best of my recollection, I never observed the old gentleman either enter the reading room or depart from it,

or move from his chair or lay down the newspaper, or exchange a look with any person in the company

unless it were myself.

He was not by any means invariably in his place.

In the evening, for instance, though often at the reading room myself, I never saw him.

It was at the brightest new tide that I used to behold him,

sitting within the most comfortable focus of the glowing fire, as real and lifelike is any object,

except that he was so very old and of an ashen complexion, as any other in the room.

After a long while of the strange intercourse, if such it can be called,

I remember once, at least, and I know not, but oftener,

a sad, wistful, disappointed gaze, which the ghost fixed upon me from beneath his spectacles,

a melancholy look of hopelessness, which if my heart had not been as hard as a paving stone,

I could hardly have withstood.

But I did withstand it, and I think I saw him no more after this last appealing look,

which still dwells in my memory, as perfectly as while my own eyes were encountering the dim and bliered eyes of the ghost.

And whenever I recall the strange passage of my life,

I see the small, old, withered figure of Dr. Harris, sitting in his accustom chair,

the Boston Post in his hand, his spectacles shoved upwards,

and gazing at me as I close the door of the reading room,

with that wistful, appealing, hopeless, helpless look.

I have only to add that it was not until long after I had ceased to encounter the ghost

that I became aware how very odd and strange the whole affair had been.

And even now, I am made sensible of its strangeness,

chiefly by the wonder and incredulity of those to whom I tell the story.

End of The Ghost of Dr. Harris, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

At Amika Insurance, we know it's not just what's inside your home that matters.

It's who you share it with.

That's why we work even harder to protect it.

And as a mutual insurance company, we're built for our customers.

We prioritize your needs and are here for you when you need us.

Amika, empathy is our best policy.

Visit amika.com and get a quote today.

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing.

Victory Lane?

Yeah.

It's even better with Chamba by my side.

Race to ChambaCasino.com.

Let's Chamba.

No purchase necessary.

VTW Group, voidware prohibited by law.

CTNC's, 21 plus, sponsored by ChambaCasino.