Joshua Marvel. B. L. Farjeon
again. "Ah that must be adhesiveness."
"I don't know what that means."
"Give me the dictionary;" and Dan with eager fingers turned over the pages of an old Walker's Dictionary. "'Adhesive--sticking, tenacious,'" he read. "That is, that I stick to a thing, as I mean to do to this. Now I'll tell you what we'll do, Jo. I shall sleep at your house to-morrow night, and when I am asleep, you shall press my organ of combativeness--put your fingers on it--yes, there; and when I wake I will tell you what I have dreamed of."
"All right," said Joshua, removing his fingers.
"You will be able to find the place again?"
"Yes, Dan."
"And you will be sure to keep awake?"
"Sure, Dan."
The following night, Joshua waited very patiently until Dan was asleep. He had to wait a long time; for Dan, in consequence of his anxiety, was longer than usual getting to sleep. Once or twice Joshua thought that his friend was in the Land of Nod, and he commenced operations, but he was interrupted by Dan saying drowsily, "I am not asleep yet, Jo." At length Dan really went off, and then Joshua, very quietly and with great care, felt for Dan's organ of combativeness, and pressed it. Joshua looked at his sleeping friend with anxiety. "Perhaps he will hit out at me," he thought. But Dan lay perfectly still, and Joshua, after waiting and watching in vain for some indication of the nature of Dan's sleeping fancies, began to feel very sleepy himself, and went to bed. In the morning, when they were both awake, Joshua asked what Dan had dreamed of.
"I can't remember," said Dan, rubbing his eyes.
"I pressed your combativeness for a long time, Dan," said Joshua; "and I pressed it so hard that I was almost afraid you would hit out."
"I didn't, did I?"
"No; you were as still as a mouse."
"I dreamed of something, though," said Dan, considering. "Oh, I remember! I dreamed of you, So; you were standing on a big ship, with a big telescope in your hand. You had no cap on, and your hair was all flying about."
"Were there any sailors on the ship?"
"A good many."
"Did you quarrel with any of them?"
"I didn't dream of myself at all."
"Did any of the sailors quarrel with me?"
"There wasn't any quarrelling, Jo, that I can remember."
"So you see," said Joshua, "that it is all fudge."
"I don't see that at all. Now I think of it, it isn't likely that I should dream of quarrelling with any one or fighting with any one when I was dreaming of you, Jo."
"Or perhaps you haven't any combativeness, Dan."
"Perhaps I haven't. It wouldn't be of much use to me if I had, for I shouldn't know how to fight."
"Or perhaps your combativeness is so small that it won't act," said Joshua sportively.
"Don't joke about it, Jo," said Dan. "You don't know how serious I am, and how disappointed I feel at its being a failure. Will you try it again to-night?"
Joshua, seeing that Dan was very much in earnest, readily promised; and the experiment was repeated that night, with the same result. After that the subject dropped for a time.
But if Dan's organ of adhesiveness--which, phrenologically, means affection, friendship, attachment--was large, it was scarcely more powerful than his organ of concentrativeness. His love for Joshua was perfect. He knew that Joshua's choice of a pursuit would separate him from his friend. When he said to Joshua, "I shall live in you, Jo," the words conveyed the expression of no light feeling, but of a deep earnest longing and desire to be always with his friend--to be always with him, although oceans divided them. If no misfortune had befallen him, if his limbs had been sound and his body strong, Dan would have been intellectually superior to boys in the same station of life as himself. Debarred as he was from their amusements, their anxieties, and their general ways of life he was thrown, as it were, upon his intellect for consolation. It brought him, by the blessing of God, such consolation that his misfortune might have been construed into a thing to be coveted. There is good in every thing.
All Dan's sympathies were with Joshua. Dan admired him for his determination, for his desire to be better than his fellows. It was Dan who first declared that Joshua was to be a hero; and Joshua accepted Dan's dictum with complacency. It threw a halo of romance around his determination not to be a wood-turner, and not to do as his father had done before him. The reader, from these remarks, or the incidents that follow, may now or presently understand why the wildly-vague essay on the "Philosophy of Dreams; or the Triumph of Mind over Matter," took Dan's mind prisoner and so infatuated him.
Referring to the book again, after the failure of the experiments upon his organ of combativeness, Dan found a few simple directions by which the reader could test, in a minor degree, the power of the mind over the sleeping body. One of the most simple was this: A person, before he goes to sleep, must resolutely make up his mind to wake at a certain hour in the morning. He must say to himself, "I want to wake at five o'clock--at five o'clock--at five o'clock; I will awake at five o'clock--I will--I will--I will!" and continue to repeat the words and the determination over and over again until he fell asleep, with the resolve firmly fixed in his mind. If you do this, said the writer, you will awake at five o'clock. Dan tried this experiment the same night--and failed. He repeated it the following night, and the night following that, with the same result. His sleep was disturbed, but that was all. But on the fourth night matters were different. Five o'clock was the hour Dan fixed upon, and nothing was more certain than that on the fourth night Dan woke up at the precise moment. There were two churches in the immediate neighborhood, and, as he woke, Dan heard the first church-bell toll the hour. One, two, three, four, five. Each stroke of the bell was followed by a dismal hum of woful tribulation. Then the other church-bell struck the hour, and each stroke of that was followed by a cheerful ring, bright and crisp and clear. Dan smiled and hugged himself, and went to sleep again, cherishing wild hopes which he dared not confess even to himself. He tried the experiment on the following night, fixing on a different time, half-past three. Undaunted by that and many other failures, he tried again and again, until one night he awoke when it was dark. He waited anxiously to hear the clocks strike. It seemed to be a very long half-hour, but the church-bell struck at last. One, two, three, four. With a droning sound at the end of each stroke, as if a myriad bees, imprisoned in a cell, were giving vent to a long-sustained and simultaneous groan of entreaty to be set free; or as if the bell were wailing for the hour that was dead. Then the joyous church-bell struck One, two, three, four. A wedding-peal in each stroke; sparkling, although invisible, like stars in a clear sky on a frosty night.
Dan went to sleep, almost perfectly happy.
He repeated his experiment every night, until he had a very nearly perfect command over sleep as far as regarded time, and could wake almost at any hour he desired. Then he took a forward step. While playing with his birds he said, "To-night I will dream of you." But the thought intervened that he had often dreamed of the birds and that to dream of them that night would not be very remarkable. So he said, "No, I will not dream of the birds that are living; I will dream of Golden Cloud." It was a long time now since Golden Cloud had been buried, but Dan had never forgotten his pet. When he went to bed he said, "I will dream of Golden Cloud--a pleasant dream." And he dwelt upon his wish, and expressed it in words, again and again. That night he dreamed of Golden Cloud, and of its pretty tricks; of its growing old and shaky; of its death and burial. Then he saw something that he had never seen before. He saw it lying quite contented and happy at the bottom of its flower-pot coffin, and when he chirruped to it, it chirruped in return.
He told his dream to Joshua.
"I have dreamed of Golden Cloud a good many times," said Joshua.
"But I made up my mind especially to dream of Golden Cloud," said Dan, "and I dreamed of it the same night. At other times, my dreaming of it was not premeditated. It came in the usual way of dreams."
"What