Heidegger, "may I reckon on
your aid in performing an exceedingly curious experiment?"
Now Dr. Heidegger was a very strange old gentleman, whose
eccentricity had become the nucleus for a thousand fantastic
stories. Some of these fables, to my shame be it spoken, might
possibly be traced back to my own veracious self; and if any
passages of the present tale should startle the reader's faith, I must
be content to bear the stigma of a fiction monger.
When the doctor's four guests heard him talk of his proposed
experiment, they anticipated nothing more wonderful than the murder of
a mouse in an air pump, or the examination of a cobweb by the
microscope, or some similar nonsense, with which he was constantly
in the habit of pestering his intimates. But without waiting for a
reply, Dr. Heidegger hobbled across the chamber, and returned with the
same ponderous folio, bound in black leather, which common report
affirmed to be a book of magic. Undoing the silver clasps, he opened
the volume, and took from among its black-letter pages a rose, or what
was once a rose, though now the green leaves and crimson petals had
assumed one brownish hue, and the ancient flower seemed ready to
crumble to dust in the doctor's hands.
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