down and fell into a dreamy contemplation of that great footprint in the
ashes. By and by its outlines began to waver and grow dim. I glanced up
and the broad gas-flame was slowly wilting away. In the same moment I
heard that elephantine tread again. I noted its approach, nearer and
nearer, along the musty halls, and dimmer and dimmer the light waned.
The tread reached my very door and paused–the light had dwindled to a
sickly blue, and all things about me lay in a spectral twilight. The
door did not open, and yet I felt a faint gust of air fan my cheek, and
presently was conscious of a huge, cloudy presence before me. I watched
it with fascinated eyes. A pale glow stole over the Thing; gradually its
cloudy folds took shape–an arm appeared, then legs, then a body, and
last a great sad face looked out of the vapor. Stripped of its filmy
housings, naked, muscular and comely, the majestic Cardiff Giant loomed
above me!
All my misery vanished–for a child might know that no harm could come
with that benignant countenance. My cheerful spirits returned at once,
and in sympathy with them the gas flamed up brightly again. Never a
lonely outcast was so glad to welcome company as I was to greet the
friendly giant. I said:
“Why, is it nobody but you? Do you know, I have been scared to death for
the last two or three hours? I am most honestly glad to see you. I wish
I had a chair– Here, here, don’t try to sit down in that thing–
But it was too late. He was in it before I could stop him and down he
went–I never saw a chair shivered so in my life.
“Stop, stop, you’ll ruin ev–”
Too late again. There was another crash, and another chair was resolved
into its original elements.
“Confound it, haven’t you got any judgment at’ all? Do you want to ruin
all the furniture on the place? Here, here, you petrified fool–”
But it was no use. Before I could arrest him he had sat down on the bed,
and it was a melancholy ruin.
“Now what sort of a way is that to do? First you come lumbering about
the place bringing a legion of vagabond goblins along with you to worry
me to death, and then when I overlook an indelicacy of costume which
would not be tolerated anywhere by cultivated people except in a
respectable theater, and not even there if the nudity were of your sex,
you repay me by wrecking all the furniture you can find to sit down on.
And why will you? You damage yourself as much as you do me. You have
broken off the end of your spinal column, and littered up the floor with
chips of your hams till the place looks like a marble yard. You ought to
be ashamed of yourself–you are big enough to know better.”
“Well, I will not break any more furniture. But what am I to do? I have
not had a chance to sit down for a century.” And the tears came into his
eyes.
“Poor devil,” I said, “I should not have been so harsh with you. And you
are an orphan, too, no doubt. But sit down on the floor here–nothing
else can stand your weight–and besides, we cannot be sociable with you
away up there above me; I want you down where I can perch on this high
counting-house stool and gossip with you face to face.” So he sat down
on the floor, and lit a pipe which I gave him, threw one of my red
blankets over his shoulders, inverted my sitz-bath on his head, helmet
fashion, and made himself picturesque and comfortable. Then he crossed
his ankles, while I renewed the fire, and exposed the flat, honeycombed
bottoms of his prodigious feet to the grateful warmth.
“What is the matter with the bottom of your feet and the back of your
legs, that they are gouged up so?”
“Infernal chilblains–I caught them clear up to the back of my head,
roosting out there under Newell’s farm. But I love the place; I love it