After an hour’s walk my tormentors halted before the mouth of an oven,—­a furnace heated seven times, and now roaring with flames.  They grasped me, one hold of each hand and foot.  Standing before the blazing mouth, they, with a swing, and a “one, two, three....”

I again assure the reader that in this narrative I have set down nothing that was not actually dreamed, and much, very much of this wonderful vision I have been obliged to omit.

Haec fabula docet:  It is dangerous for a young man to leave off the use of tobacco.

FIFTH STUDY

I

I wish I could fitly celebrate the joyousness of the New England winter.  Perhaps I could if I more thoroughly believed in it.  But skepticism comes in with the south wind.  When that begins to blow, one feels the foundations of his belief breaking up.  This is only another way of saying that it is more difficult, if it be not impossible, to freeze out orthodoxy, or any fixed notion, than it is to thaw it out; though it is a mere fancy to suppose that this is the reason why the martyrs, of all creeds, were burned at the stake.  There is said to be a great relaxation in New England of the ancient strictness in the direction of toleration of opinion, called by some a lowering of the standard, and by others a raising of the banner of liberality; it might be an interesting inquiry how much this change is due to another change,—­the softening of the New England winter and the shifting of the Gulf Stream.  It is the fashion nowadays to refer almost everything to physical causes, and this hint is a gratuitous contribution to the science of metaphysical physics.

The hindrance to entering fully into the joyousness of a New England winter, except far inland among the mountains, is the south wind.  It is a grateful wind, and has done more, I suspect, to demoralize society than any other.  It is not necessary to remember that it filled the silken sails of Cleopatra’s galley.  It blows over New England every few days, and is in some portions of it the prevailing wind.  That it brings the soft clouds, and sometimes continues long enough to almost deceive the expectant buds of the fruit trees, and to tempt the robin from the secluded evergreen copses, may be nothing; but it takes the tone out of the mind, and engenders discontent, making one long for the tropics; it feeds the weakened imagination on palm-leaves and the lotus.  Before we know it we become demoralized, and shrink from the tonic of the sudden change to sharp weather, as the steamed hydropathic patient does from the plunge.  It is the insidious temptation that assails us when we are braced up to profit by the invigorating rigor of winter.