Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign
Masque of The Red Death
Mellonta Tauta
Mesmeric Revelation
Metzengerstein
Morella
Ms. Found in a Bottle
Murders In The Rue Morgue
Mystery of Marie Roget
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Never Bet the Devil Your Head
Oblong Box
Old English Poetry
Oval Portrait
Philosophy of Composition
Philosophy of Furniture
Pit and the Pendulum
Poetic Principle
Power of Words
Preface
Premature Burial
Purloined Letter
Raven
Romance
Scythe of Time
Shadow - A Parable
Signora Zenobia
Silence
Siope
Sleeper
Some Words with a Mummy
Song
Sonnet -- To Science
Spectacles
Sphinx
Spirits of The Dead
System of Doctor Tarr And Professor Fether
Tale of Jerusalem
Tale of The Ragged Mountains
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
Tamerlane
Tell-Tale Heart
Testimonials
Thou Art The Man
Thousand-and-Second Tale Of Scheherazade
Three Sundays in a Week
To F--
To Frances S. Osgood
To Helen
To Isadore
To Marie Louise
To My Mother
To One In Paradise
To The River
To Zante
Ulalume
Valentine
Valley of Unrest
Village Street
Visionary
Von Jung
Von Kempelen And His Discovery
Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling
William Wilson
X-ing a Paragrab
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The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe
(1843)
Electronically Developed by MobileReference
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Man That Was Used Up
Edgar Allen Poe Biography
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The Angel of the Odd
AN EXTRAVAGANZA.
IT was a chilly November afternoon. I had just consummated an unusually hearty dinner, of which the dyspeptic truffe formed not the least important item, and was sitting alone in the dining-room, with my feet upon the fender, and at my elbow a small table which I had rolled up to the fire, and upon which were some apologies for dessert, with some miscellaneous bottles of wine, spirit and liqueur. In the morning I had been reading Glover's 'Leonidas,' Wilkie's 'Epigoniad,' Lamartine's 'Pilgrimage,' Barlow's 'Columbiad,' Tuckermann's 'Sicily,' and Griswold's 'Curiosities'; I am willing to confess, therefore, that I now felt a little stupid. I made effort to arouse myself by aid of frequent Lafitte, and, all failing, I betook myself to a stray newspaper in despair. Having carefully perused the column of 'houses to let,' and the column of 'dogs lost,' and then the two columns of 'wives and apprentices runaway,' I attacked with great resolution the editorial matter, and, reading it from beginning to end without understanding a syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese, and so re-read it from the end to the beginning, but with no more satisfactory result. I was about throwing away, in disgust,
'This folio of four pages, happy work
Which not even critics criticise,'
when I felt my attention somewhat aroused by the paragraph which follows:
'The avenues to death are numerous and strange. A London paper mentions the decease of a person from a singular cause. He was playing at 'puff the dart,' which is played with a long needle inserted in some worsted, and blown at a target through a tin tube. He placed the needle at the wrong end of the tube, and drawing his breath strongly to puff the dart forward with force, drew the needle into his throat. It entered the lungs, and in a few days killed him.'
Upon seeing this I fell into a great rage, without exactly knowing why. 'This thing,' I exclaimed, 'is a contemptible falsehood - a poor hoax - the lees of the invention of some pitiable penny-a-liner - of some wretched concoctor of accidents in Cocaigne. These fellows, knowing the extravagant gullibility of the age, set their wits to work in the imagination of improbable possibilities - of odd accidents, as they term them; but to a reflecting intellect (like mine,' I added, in parenthesis, putting my forefinger unconsciously to the side of my nose,) 'to a contemplative understanding such as I myself possess, it seems evident at once that the marvelous increase of late in these 'odd accidents' is by far the oddest accident of all. For my own part, I intend to believe nothing henceforward that has anything of the 'singular' about it.'
'Mein Gott, den, vat a vool you bees for dat!' replied one of the most remarkable voices I ever heard. At first I took it for a rumbling in my ears - such as a man sometimes experiences when getting very drunk - but, upon second thought, I considered the sound as more nearly resembling that which proceeds from an empty barrel beaten with a big stick; and, in fact, this I should have concluded it to be, but for the articulation of the syllables and words. I am by no means naturally nervous, and the very few glasses of Lafitte which I had sipped served to embolden me no little, so that I felt nothing of trepidation, but merely uplifted my eyes with a leisurely movement, and looked carefully around the room for the intruder. I could not, however, perceive any one at all.
'Humph!' resumed the voice, as I continued my survey, 'you mus pe so dronk as de pig, den, for not zee me as I zit here at your zide.'
Hereupon I bethought me of looking immediately before my nose, and there, sure enough, confronting me at the table sat a personage nondescript, although not altogether indescribable. His body was a wine-pipe, or a rum- puncheon, or something of that character, and had a truly Falstaffian air. In its nether extremity were inserted two kegs, which seemed to answer all the purposes of legs. For arms there dangled from the upper portion of the carcass two tolerably long bottles, with the necks outward for hands. All the head that I saw the monster possessed of was one of those Hessian canteens which resemble a large snuff-box with a hole in the middle of the lid. This canteen (with a funnel on its top, like a cavalier cap slouched over the eyes) was set on edge upon the puncheon, with the hole toward myself; and through this hole, which seemed puckered up like the mouth of a very precise old maid, the creature was emitting certain rumbling and grumbling noises which he evidently intended for intelligible talk.
'I zay,' said he, 'you mos pe dronk as de pig, vor zit dare and not zee me zit ere; and I zay, doo, you mos pe pigger vool as de goose, vor to dispelief vat iz print in de print. 'Tiz de troof - dat it iz - eberry vord ob it.'
