BLOWING BUBBLES.
The midnight mail was tearing up through South Staffordshire at the rate of forty miles an hour; and I, a passenger by it, was on my way from Scotland to spend Christmas at the country-seat of an old friend in North Worcestershire. Wolverhampton had been left behind, hissing and snorting from all its chimney mouths, like a den of fiery dragons, and we were being hurried with horrible tumult through what is called the “Black Country.” All around us the Temples of Tubal Cain were flinging out flames and resounding with the music of hammers. Beneath us, thousands of the votaries of that grim demi-god were delving for minerals to be sacrificed upon his altars; and above hung the night-fog, laden with the incense that arose from his mighty thuribles. I was feeding my vision with the wild, weird scene, and dreaming of Vulcan forging thunder, when there came a deafening crash as if one of Jove’s bolts had been hurled down from high Olympus. A thousand brilliant lights danced up before me for a moment, and then—life became a blank. The mail had dashed into a luggage-train.
I awoke—it seemed to me on a bright sunny morning in June—to find myself nestling in the softest of beds, beneath hangings of rich embroidery, in the midst of the cosiest of bed-chambers. I did not trouble myself to think where I was, nor how I came there, for a pleasing languor possessed my whole being. Yet I seemed to be longing for active gratification of some kind. So my eye wandered listlessly from one object to another, and my mind played idly with all the eye presented to it. At length my scattered fancies came trooping back to look upon a scene that lay far out, as it seemed to me, between the curtains at the foot of the bed. There, in an old Gothic window through which the sunlight was streaming, sat a merry little urchin blowing bubbles. His long golden curls, tossed hither and thither by the light morning breeze, played around his laughing face like the tendrils of a vine around the rich ripe fruit; and, ever and anon, as the bubbles rose up to break amongst the creeping foliage that surrounded and overhung the window, his blue eyes sparkled gleefully, and he seemed to leap for very joy. I must have watched him a long time I saw so many of his antics. But, suddenly, I became conscious of a slight pressure on my arm, and turning about, I found myself in the presence of an elderly lady who seemed to be all good nature, and a prim old gentleman who seemed to be all shirt-frill. The one was the wife of the old friend I had proposed visiting; the other the family doctor. Between them I learned that I had been seriously injured on the night of the collision; and that, following the direction on a small parcel I had had in the carriage with me, the railway officials had brought me on to the very house for which I had set out from Scotland, and where I had now lain in a state of unconsciousness many days. Aweary of their recital, I again turned languidly to the window, where my young friend, apparently unconscious of all that was passing, still sat blowing his bubbles as gleefully as ever. Watching him intently for a moment or two, I, for the first time, noticed something strange about his appearance. He did not look like a child of earth at all, but more like one of those little fellows we read about in Grecian story—a sort of Elysian little boy, scantily clothed, very plump and symmetrical, and always laughing. I had almost come to the conclusion, indeed, that Cupid, following the example of other naughty little boys of the present day, had laid by his bow and quiver for the grosser pleasures of the pipe, when it struck me that I might settle the matter at once by asking a simple question.
“Who is that little boy sitting in the window?” I asked.
“O dear! dear!” exclaimed the lady, with a sigh, “I was afraid it would be too much for him; he is wandering again.”
“I assured her I was not, and repeated the question.
“Sir,” said the prim doctor, “I am afraid you are the subject of a very singular optical illusion. The child of whom you spenk is not a living being; nor, indeed, is it altogether a phantom. It is smply a figure in a stained glass window, and—”
“But,” I interposed, “he is in motion, and his bubbles keep rising and breaking amongst the branches of that creeping plant there.”
“Allow me to finish my sentence,” said the doctor; and, going to the window, he touched a spring, and the curtain flew up. “Now, you see,” he continued, “the aerial current conveyed through the room for purposes of ventilation imparted a slight undulating motion to the white curtain in front of the window; and, as an exact photograph of the figure fell upon the curtain, the child appeared to you to move, when in reality it was doing no such thing.”
“But,” I said, “the child is still moving; he and his bubbles are passing away to the right there. Look!—look!” and I half rose up in bed to point them out.
The doctor smiled a very stately smile, and, flinging open a casement which carried away half the figure with it, pointed to a large mass of cloud that was being driven along furiously by a rude wintry wind. “Again,” he said, “you have mistaken the subject of motion; it was the cloud moving—not the figure.”
The contrast was one of the strangest imaginable. Through the warm colour of the unopened part of the window the light was streaming with the brilliancy of summer sunlight; through the open casement I could see nothing but dull leaden rain clouds. So dismal, indeed, was the outlook, that I begged the doctor to close the window as speedily as possible, and to draw down the blind, in order that I might once more revel in the pleasant illusion he had taken so much pains to dispel. He did as I desired, but the illusion was gone for ever; and though, during the long weary hours of my recovery, I often tried to carry my mind back to that morning, and to see the urchin laughing and blowing bubbles as I then saw him, the effort was useless. He still sat there, but he sat motionless; the blind and the clouds moved often—he never. Not willing, however, to part with so merry an