initial commit of ebook 9228HEADmain

11 files changed, 4654 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/9228-0.txt b/9228-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f988e1c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/9228-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1083 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Christmas Banquet, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Christmas Banquet
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: September 6, 2003 [eBook #9228]
+[Most recently updated: November 9, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: David Widger and Al Haines
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET ***
+
+
+
+
+The Christmas Banquet
+
+by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+
+
+
+FROM THE UNPUBLISHED “ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART.”
+
+
+“I have here attempted,” said Roderick, unfolding a few sheets of
+manuscript, as he sat with Rosina and the sculptor in the
+summer-house,—“I have attempted to seize hold of a personage who glides
+past me, occasionally, in my walk through life. My former sad
+experience, as you know, has gifted me with some degree of insight into
+the gloomy mysteries of the human heart, through which I have wandered
+like one astray in a dark cavern, with his torch fast flickering to
+extinction. But this man, this class of men, is a hopeless puzzle.”
+
+“Well, but propound him,” said the sculptor. “Let us have an idea of
+hint, to begin with.”
+
+“Why, indeed,” replied Roderick, “he is such a being as I could
+conceive you to carve out of marble, and some yet unrealized perfection
+of human science to endow with an exquisite mockery of intellect; but
+still there lacks the last inestimable touch of a divine Creator. He
+looks like a man; and, perchance, like a better specimen of man than
+you ordinarily meet. You might esteem him wise; he is capable of
+cultivation and refinement, and has at least an external conscience;
+but the demands that spirit makes upon spirit are precisely those to
+which he cannot respond. When at last you come close to him you find
+him chill and unsubstantial,—a mere vapor.”
+
+“I believe,” said Rosina, “I have a glimmering idea of what you mean.”
+
+“Then be thankful,” answered her husband, smiling; “but do not
+anticipate any further illumination from what I am about to read. I
+have here imagined such a man to be—what, probably, he never
+is—conscious of the deficiency in his spiritual organization. Methinks
+the result would be a sense of cold unreality wherewith he would go
+shivering through the world, longing to exchange his load of ice for
+any burden of real grief that fate could fling upon a human being.”
+
+Contenting himself with this preface, Roderick began to read.
+
+
+In a certain old gentleman’s last will and testament there appeared a
+bequest, which, as his final thought and deed, was singularly in
+keeping with a long life of melancholy eccentricity. He devised a
+considerable sum for establishing a fund, the interest of which was to
+be expended, annually forever, in preparing a Christmas Banquet for ten
+of the most miserable persons that could be found. It seemed not to be
+the testator’s purpose to make these half a score of sad hearts merry,
+but to provide that the stern or fierce expression of human discontent
+should not be drowned, even for that one holy and joyful day, amid the
+acclamations of festal gratitude which all Christendom sends up. And he
+desired, likewise, to perpetuate his own remonstrance against the
+earthly course of Providence, and his sad and sour dissent from those
+systems of religion or philosophy which either find sunshine in the
+world or draw it down from heaven.
+
+The task of inviting the guests, or of selecting among such as might
+advance their claims to partake of this dismal hospitality, was
+confided to the two trustees or stewards of the fund. These gentlemen,
+like their deceased friend, were sombre humorists, who made it their
+principal occupation to number the sable threads in the web of human
+life, and drop all the golden ones out of the reckoning. They performed
+their present office with integrity and judgment. The aspect of the
+assembled company, on the day of the first festival, might not, it is
+true, have satisfied every beholder that these were especially the
+individuals, chosen forth from all the world, whose griefs were worthy
+to stand as indicators of the mass of human suffering. Yet, after due
+consideration, it could not be disputed that here was a variety of
+hopeless discomfort, which, if it sometimes arose from causes
+apparently inadequate, was thereby only the shrewder imputation against
+the nature and mechanism of life.
+
+The arrangements and decorations of the banquet were probably intended
+to signify that death in life which had been the testator’s definition
+of existence. The hall, illuminated by torches, was hung round with
+curtains of deep and dusky purple, and adorned with branches of cypress
+and wreaths of artificial flowers, imitative of such as used to be
+strewn over the dead. A sprig of parsley was laid by every plate. The
+main reservoir of wine, was a sepulchral urn of silver, whence the
+liquor was distributed around the table in small vases, accurately
+copied from those that held the tears of ancient mourners. Neither had
+the stewards—if it were their taste that arranged these
+details—forgotten the fantasy of the old Egyptians, who seated a
+skeleton at every festive board, and mocked their own merriment with
+the imperturbable grin of a death’s-head. Such a fearful guest,
+shrouded in a black mantle, sat now at the head of the table. It was
+whispered, I know not with what truth, that the testator himself had
+once walked the visible world with the machinery of that sane skeleton,
+and that it was one of the stipulations of his will, that he should
+thus be permitted to sit, from year to year, at the banquet which he
+had instituted. If so, it was perhaps covertly implied that he had
+cherished no hopes of bliss beyond the grave to compensate for the
+evils which he felt or imagined here. And if, in their bewildered
+conjectures as to the purpose of earthly existence, the banqueters
+should throw aside the veil, and cast an inquiring glance at this
+figure of death, as seeking thence the solution otherwise unattainable,
+the only reply would be a stare of the vacant eye-caverns and a grin of
+the skeleton jaws. Such was the response that the dead man had fancied
+himself to receive when he asked of Death to solve the riddle of his
+life; and it was his desire to repeat it when the guests of his dismal
+hospitality should find themselves perplexed with the same question.
+
+“What means that wreath?” asked several of the company, while viewing
+the decorations of the table.
+
+They alluded to a wreath of cypress, which was held on high by a
+skeleton arm, protruding from within the black mantle.
+
+“It is a crown,” said one of the stewards, “not for the worthiest, but
+for the wofulest, when he shall prove his claim to it.”
+
+The guest earliest bidden to the festival was a man of soft and gentle
+character, who had not energy to struggle against the heavy despondency
+to which his temperament rendered him liable; and therefore with
+nothing outwardly to excuse him from happiness, he had spent a life of
+quiet misery that made his blood torpid, and weighed upon his breath,
+and sat like a ponderous night-fiend upon every throb of his
+unresisting heart. His wretchedness seemed as deep as his original
+nature, if not identical with it. It was the misfortune of a second
+guest to cherish within his bosom a diseased heart, which had become so
+wretchedly sore that the continual and unavoidable rubs of the world,
+the blow of an enemy, the careless jostle of a stranger, and even the
+faithful and loving touch of a friend, alike made ulcers in it. As is
+the habit of people thus afflicted, he found his chief employment in
+exhibiting these miserable sores to any who would give themselves the
+pain of viewing them. A third guest was a hypochondriac, whose
+imagination wrought necromancy in his outward and inward world, and
+caused him to see monstrous faces in the household fire, and dragons in
+the clouds of sunset, and fiends in the guise of beautiful women, and
+something ugly or wicked beneath all the pleasant surfaces of nature.
+His neighbor at table was one who, in his early youth, had trusted
+mankind too much, and hoped too highly in their behalf, and, in meeting
+with many disappointments, had become desperately soured. For several
+years back this misanthrope bad employed himself in accumulating
+motives for hating and despising his race,—such as murder, lust,
+treachery, ingratitude, faithlessness of trusted friends, instinctive
+vices of children, impurity of women, hidden guilt in men of saint-like
+aspect,—and, in short, all manner of black realities that sought to
+decorate themselves with outward grace or glory. But at every atrocious
+fact that was added to his catalogue, at every increase of the sad
+knowledge which he spent his life to collect, the native impulses of
+the poor man’s loving and confiding heart made him groan with anguish.
+Next, with his heavy brow bent downward, there stole into the hall a
+man naturally earnest and impassioned, who, from his immemorial
+infancy, had felt the consciousness of a high message to the world;
+but, essaying to deliver it, had found either no voice or form of
+speech, or else no ears to listen. Therefore his whole life was a
+bitter questioning of himself: “Why have not men acknowledged my
+mission? Am I not a self-deluding fool? What business have I on earth?
+Where is my grave?” Throughout the festival, he quaffed frequent
+draughts from the sepulchral urn of wine, hoping thus to quench the
+celestial fire that tortured his own breast and could not benefit his
+race.
+
+Then there entered, having flung away a ticket for a ball, a gay
+gallant of yesterday, who had found four or five wrinkles in his brow,
+and more gray hairs than he could well number on his head. Endowed with
+sense and feeling, he had nevertheless spent his youth in folly, but
+had reached at last that dreary point in life where Folly quits us of
+her own accord, leaving us to make friends with Wisdom if we can. Thus,
+cold and desolate, he had come to seek Wisdom at the banquet, and
+wondered if the skeleton were she. To eke out the company, the stewards
+had invited a distressed poet from his home in the almshouse, and a
+melancholy idiot from the street-corner. The latter had just the
+glimmering of sense that was sufficient to make him conscious of a
+vacancy, which the poor fellow, all his life long, had mistily sought
+to fill up with intelligence, wandering up and down the streets, and
+groaning miserably because his attempts were ineffectual. The only lady
+in the hall was one who had fallen short of absolute and perfect
+beauty, merely by the trifling defect of a slight cast in her left eye.
+But this blemish, minute as it was, so shocked the pure ideal of her
+soul, rather than her vanity, that she passed her life in solitude, and
+veiled her countenance even from her own gaze. So the skeleton sat
+shrouded at one end of the table, and this poor lady at the other.
+
+One other guest remains to be described. He was a young man of smooth
+brow, fair cheek, and fashionable mien. So far as his exterior
+developed him, he might much more suitably have found a place at some
+merry Christmas table, than have been numbered among the blighted,
+fate-stricken, fancy-tortured set of ill-starred banqueters. Murmurs
+arose among the guests as they noted, the glance of general scrutiny
+which the intruder threw over his companions. What had he to do among
+them? Why did not the skeleton of the dead founder of the feast unbend
+its rattling joints, arise, and motion the unwelcome stranger from the
+board?
+
+“Shameful!” said the morbid man, while a new ulcer broke out in his
+heart. “He comes to mock us! we shall be the jest of his tavern friends
+I—he will make a farce of our miseries, and bring it out upon the
+stage!”
+
+“O, never mind him!” said the hypochondriac, smiling sourly. “He shall
+feast from yonder tureen of viper-soup; and if there is a fricassee of
+scorpions on the table, pray let him have his share of it. For the
+dessert, he shall taste the apples of Sodom, then, if he like our
+Christmas fare, let him return again next year!”
+
+“Trouble him not,” murmured the melancholy man, with gentleness. “What
+matters it whether the consciousness of misery come a few years sooner
+or later? If this youth deem himself happy now, yet let him sit with us
+for the sake of the wretchedness to come.”
+
+The poor idiot approached the young man with that mournful aspect of
+vacant inquiry which his face continually wore, and which caused people
+to say that he was always in search of his missing wits. After no
+little examination he touched the stranger’s hand, but immediately drew
+back his own, shaking his head and shivering.
+
+“Cold, cold, cold!” muttered the idiot.
+
+The young man shivered too, and smiled.
+
+“Gentlemen, and you, madam,” said one of the stewards of the festival,
+“do not conceive so ill either of our caution or judgment, as to
+imagine that we have admitted this young stranger—Gervayse Hastings by
+name—without a full investigation and thoughtful balance of his claims.
+Trust me, not a guest at the table is better entitled to his seat.”
+
+The steward’s guaranty was perforce satisfactory. The company,
+therefore, took their places, and addressed themselves to the serious
+business of the feast, but were soon disturbed by the hypochondriac,
+who thrust back his chair, complaining that a dish of stewed toads and
+vipers was set before him, and that there was green ditchwater in his
+cup of wine. This mistake being amended, he quietly resumed his seat.
+The wine, as it flowed freely from the sepulchral urn, seemed to come
+imbued with all gloomy inspirations; so that its influence was not to
+cheer, but either to sink the revellers into a deeper melancholy, or
+elevate their spirits to an enthusiasm of wretchedness. The
+conversation was various. They told sad stories about people who might
+have been Worthy guests at such a festival as the present. They talked
+of grisly incidents in human history; of strange crimes, which, if
+truly considered, were but convulsions of agony; of some lives that had
+been altogether wretched, and of others, which, wearing a general
+semblance of happiness, had yet been deformed, sooner or later, by
+misfortune, as by the intrusion of a grim face at a banquet; of
+death-bed scenes, and what dark intimations might be gathered from the
+words of dying men; of suicide, and whether the more eligible mode were
+by halter, knife, poison, drowning, gradual starvation, or the fumes of
+charcoal. The majority of the guests, as is the custom with people
+thoroughly and profoundly sick at heart, were anxious to make their own
+woes the theme of discussion, and prove themselves most excellent in
+anguish. The misanthropist went deep into the philosophy of evil, and
+wandered about in the darkness, with now and then a gleam of discolored
+light hovering on ghastly shapes and horrid scenery. Many a miserable
+thought, such as men have stumbled upon from age to age, did he now
+rake up again, and gloat over it as an inestimable gem, a diamond, a
+treasure far preferable to those bright, spiritual revelations of a
+better world, which are like precious stones from heaven’s pavement.
+And then, amid his lore of wretchedness he hid his face and wept.
+
+It was a festival at which the woful man of Uz might suitably have been
+a guest, together with all, in each succeeding age, who have tasted
+deepest of the bitterness of life. And be it said, too, that every son
+or daughter of woman, however favored with happy fortune, might, at one
+sad moment or another, have claimed the privilege of a stricken heart,
+to sit down at this table. But, throughout the feast, it was remarked
+that the young stranger, Gervayse Hastings, was unsuccessful in his
+attempts to catch its pervading spirit. At any deep, strong thought
+that found utterance, and which was torn out, as it were, from the
+saddest recesses of human consciousness, he looked mystified and
+bewildered; even more than the poor idiot, who seemed to grasp at such
+things with his earnest heart, and thus occasionally to comprehend
+them. The young man’s conversation was of a colder and lighter kind,
+often brilliant, but lacking the powerful characteristics of a nature
+that had been developed by suffering.
+
+“Sir,” said the misanthropist, bluntly, in reply to some observation by
+Gervayse Hastings, “pray do not address me again. We have no right to
+talk together. Our minds have nothing in common. By what claim you
+appear at this banquet I cannot guess; but methinks, to a man who could
+say what you have just now said, my companions and myself must seem no
+more than shadows flickering on the wall. And precisely such a shadow
+are you to us.”
+
+The young man smiled and bowed, but, drawing himself back in his chair,
+he buttoned his coat over his breast, as if the banqueting-ball were
+growing chill. Again the idiot fixed his melancholy stare upon the
+youth, and murmured, “Cold! cold! cold!”
+
+The banquet drew to its conclusion, and the guests departed. Scarcely
+had they stepped across the threshold of the hall, when the scene that
+had there passed seemed like the vision of a sick fancy, or an
+exhalation from a stagnant heart. Now and then, however, during the
+year that ensued, these melancholy people caught glimpses of one
+another, transient, indeed, but enough to prove that they walked the
+earth with the ordinary allotment of reality. Sometimes a pair of them
+came face to face, while stealing through the evening twilight,
+enveloped in their sable cloaks. Sometimes they casually met in
+churchyards. Once, also, it happened that two of the dismal banqueters
+mutually started at recognizing each other in the noonday sunshine of a
+crowded street, stalking there like ghosts astray. Doubtless they
+wondered why the skeleton did not come abroad at noonday too.
+
+But whenever the necessity of their affairs compelled these Christmas
+guests into the bustling world, they were sure to encounter the young
+man who had so unaccountably been admitted to the festival. They saw
+him among the gay and fortunate; they caught the sunny sparkle of his
+eye; they heard the light and careless tones of his voice, and muttered
+to themselves with such indignation as only the aristocracy of
+wretchedness could kindle, “The traitor! The vile impostor! Providence,
+in its own good time, may give him a right to feast among us!” But the
+young man’s unabashed eye dwelt upon their gloomy figures as they
+passed him, seeming to say, perchance with somewhat of a sneer, “First,
+know my secret then, measure your claims with mine!”
+
+The step of Time stole onward, and soon brought merry Christmas round
+again, with glad and solemn worship in the churches, and sports, games,
+festivals, and everywhere the bright face of Joy beside the household
+fire. Again likewise the hall, with its curtains of dusky purple, was
+illuminated by the death-torches gleaming on the sepulchral decorations
+of the banquet. The veiled, skeleton sat in state, lifting the
+cypress-wreath above its head, as the guerdon of some guest illustrious
+in the qualifications which there claimed precedence. As the stewards
+deemed the world inexhaustible in misery, and were desirous of
+recognizing it in all its forms, they had not seen fit to reassemble
+the company of the former year. New faces now threw their gloom across
+the table.
+
+There was a man of nice conscience, who bore a blood-stain in his
+heart—the death of a fellow-creature—which, for his more exquisite
+torture, had chanced with such a peculiarity of circumstances, that he
+could not absolutely determine whether his will had entered into the
+deed or not. Therefore, his whole life was spent in the agony of an
+inward trial for murder, with a continual sifting of the details of his
+terrible calamity, until his mind had no longer any thought, nor his
+soul any emotion, disconnected with it, There was a mother, too,—a
+mother once, but a desolation now,—who, many years before, had gone out
+on a pleasure-party, and, returning, found her infant smothered in its
+little bed. And ever since she has been tortured with the fantasy that
+her buried baby lay smothering in its coffin. Then there was an aged
+lady, who had lived from time immemorial with a constant tremor
+quivering through her-frame. It was terrible to discern her dark shadow
+tremulous upon the wall; her lips, likewise, were tremulous; and the
+expression of her eye seemed to indicate that her soul was trembling
+too. Owing to the bewilderment and confusion which made almost a chaos
+of her intellect, it was impossible to discover what dire misfortune
+had thus shaken her nature to its depths; so that the stewards had
+admitted her to the table, not from any acquaintance with her history,
+but on the safe testimony of her miserable aspect. Some surprise was
+expressed at the presence of a bluff, red-faced gentleman, a certain
+Mr. Smith, who had evidently the fat of many a rich feast within him,
+and the habitual twinkle of whose eye betrayed a disposition to break
+forth into uproarious laughter for little cause or none. It turned out,
+however, that, with the best possible flow of spirits, our poor friend
+was afflicted with a physical disease of the heart, which threatened
+instant death on the slightest cachinnatory indulgence, or even that
+titillation of the bodily frame produced by merry thoughts. In this
+dilemma he had sought admittance to the banquet, on the ostensible plea
+of his irksome and miserable state, but, in reality, with the hope of
+imbibing a life-preserving melancholy.
+
+A married couple had been invited from a motive of bitter humor, it
+being well understood that they rendered each other unutterably
+miserable whenever they chanced to meet, and therefore must necessarily
+be fit associates at the festival. In contrast with these was another
+couple still unmarried, who had interchanged their hearts in early
+life, but had been divided by circumstances as impalpable as morning
+mist, and kept apart so long that their spirits now found it impossible
+to meet, Therefore, yearning for communion, yet shrinking from one
+another and choosing none beside, they felt themselves companionless in
+life, and looked upon eternity as a boundless desert. Next to the
+skeleton sat a mere son of earth,—a hunter of the Exchange,—a gatherer
+of shining dust,—a man whose life’s record was in his ledger, and whose
+soul’s prison-house the vaults of the bank where he kept his deposits.
+This person had been greatly perplexed at his invitation, deeming
+himself one of the most fortunate men in the city; but the stewards
+persisted in demanding his presence, assuring him that he had no
+conception how miserable he was.
+
+And now appeared a figure which we must acknowledge as our acquaintance
+of the former festival. It was Gervayse Hastings, whose presence had
+then caused so much question and criticism, and who now took his place
+with the composure of one whose claims were satisfactory to himself and
+must needs be allowed by others. Yet his easy and unruffled face
+betrayed no sorrow.
+
+The well-skilled beholders gazed a moment into his eyes and shook their
+heads, to miss the unuttered sympathy—the countersign never to be
+falsified—of those whose hearts are cavern-mouths through which they
+descend into a region of illimitable woe and recognize other wanderers
+there.
+
+“Who is this youth?” asked the man with a bloodstain on his conscience.
+“Surely he has never gone down into the depths! I know all the aspects
+of those who have passed through the dark valley. By what right is he
+among us?”
+
+“Ah, it is a sinful thing to come hither without a sorrow,” murmured
+the aged lady, in accents that partook of the eternal tremor which
+pervaded her whole being “Depart, young man! Your soul has never been
+shaken, and, therefore, I tremble so much the more to look at you.”
+
+“His soul shaken! No; I’ll answer for it,” said bluff Mr. Smith,
+pressing his hand upon his heart and making himself as melancholy as he
+could, for fear of a fatal explosion of laughter. “I know the lad well;
+he has as fair prospects as any young man about town, and has no more
+right among us miserable creatures than the child unborn. He never was
+miserable and probably never will be!”
+
+“Our honored guests,” interposed the stewards, “pray have patience with
+us, and believe, at least, that our deep veneration for the sacredness
+of this solemnity would preclude any wilful violation of it. Receive
+this young man to your table. It may not be too much to say, that no
+guest here would exchange his own heart for the one that beats within
+that youthful bosom!”
+
+“I’d call it a bargain, and gladly, too,” muttered Mr. Smith, with a
+perplexing mixture of sadness and mirthful conceit. “A plague upon
+their nonsense! My own heart is the only really miserable one in the
+company; it will certainly be the death of me at last!”
+
+Nevertheless, as on the former occasion, the judgment of the stewards
+being without appeal, the company sat down. The obnoxious guest made no
+more attempt to obtrude his conversation on those about him, but
+appeared to listen to the table-talk with peculiar assiduity, as if
+some inestimable secret, otherwise beyond his reach, might be conveyed
+in a casual word. And in truth, to those who could understand and value
+it, there was rich matter in the upgushings and outpourings of these
+initiated souls to whom sorrow had been a talisman, admitting them into
+spiritual depths which no other spell can open. Sometimes out of the
+midst of densest gloom there flashed a momentary radiance, pure as
+crystal, bright as the flame of stars, and shedding such a glow upon
+the mysteries of life, that the guests were ready to exclaim, “Surely
+the riddle is on the point of being solved!” At such illuminated
+intervals the saddest mourners felt it to be revealed that mortal
+griefs are but shadowy and external; no more than the sable robes
+voluminously shrouding a certain divine reality, and thus indicating
+what might otherwise be altogether invisible to mortal eye.
+
+“Just now,” remarked the trembling old woman, “I seemed to see beyond
+the outside. And then my everlasting tremor passed away!”
+
+“Would that I could dwell always in these momentary gleams of light!”
+said the man of stricken conscience. “Then the blood-stain in my heart
+would be washed clean away.”
+
+This strain of conversation appeared so unintelligibly absurd to good
+Mr. Smith, that he burst into precisely the fit of laughter which his
+physicians had warned him against, as likely to prove instantaneously
+fatal. In effect, he fell back in his chair a corpse, with a broad grin
+upon his face, while his ghost, perchance, remained beside it
+bewildered at its unpremeditated exit. This catastrophe of course broke
+up the festival.
+
+“How is this? You do not tremble!” observed the tremulous old woman to
+Gervayse Hastings, who was gazing at the dead man with singular
+intentness. “Is it not awful to see him so suddenly vanish out of the
+midst of life,—this man of flesh and blood, whose earthly nature was so
+warm and strong? There is a never-ending tremor in my soul, but it
+trembles afresh at, this! And you are calm!”
+
+“Would that he could teach me somewhat!” said Gervayse Hastings,
+drawing a long breath. “Men pass before me like shadows on the wall;
+their actions, passions, feelings, are flickerings of the light, and
+then they vanish! Neither the corpse, nor yonder skeleton, nor this old
+woman’s everlasting tremor, can give me what I seek.”
+
+And then the company departed.
+
+We cannot linger to narrate, in such detail, more circumstances of
+these singular festivals, which, in accordance with the founder’s will,
+continued to be kept with the regularity of an established institution.
+In process of time the stewards adopted the custom of inviting, from
+far and near, those individuals whose misfortunes were prominent above
+other men’s, and whose mental and moral development might, therefore,
+be supposed to possess a corresponding interest. The exiled noble of
+the French Revolution, and the broken soldier of the Empire, were alike
+represented at the table. Fallen monarchs, wandering about the earth,
+have found places at that forlorn and miserable feast. The statesman,
+when his party flung him off, might, if he chose it, be once more a
+great man for the space of a single banquet. Aaron Burr’s name appears
+on the record at a period when his ruin—the profoundest and most
+striking, with more of moral circumstance in it than that of almost any
+other man—was complete in his lonely age. Stephen Guard, when his
+wealth weighed upon him like a mountain, once sought admittance of his
+own accord. It is not probable, however, that these men had any lesson
+to teach in the lore of discontent and misery which might not equally
+well have been studied in the common walks of life. Illustrious
+unfortunates attract a wider sympathy, not because their griefs are
+more intense, but because, being set on lofty pedestals, they the
+better serve mankind as instances and bywords of calamity.
+
+It concerns our present purpose to say that, at each successive
+festival, Gervayse Hastings showed his face, gradually changing from
+the smooth beauty of his youth to the thoughtful comeliness of manhood,
+and thence to the bald, impressive dignity of age. He was the only
+individual invariably present. Yet on every occasion there were
+murmurs, both from those who knew his character and position, and from
+them whose hearts shrank back as denying his companionship in their
+mystic fraternity.
+
+“Who is this impassive man?” had been asked a hundred times. “Has he
+suffered? Has he sinned? There are no traces of either. Then wherefore
+is he here?”
+
+“You must inquire of the stewards or of himself,” was the constant
+reply. “We seem to know him well here in our city, and know nothing of
+him but what is creditable and fortunate. Yet hither he comes, year
+after year, to this gloomy banquet, and sits among the guests like a
+marble statue. Ask yonder skeleton, perhaps that may solve the riddle!”
+
+It was in truth a wonder. The life of Gervayse Hastings was not merely
+a prosperous, but a brilliant one. Everything had gone well with him.
+He was wealthy, far beyond the expenditure that was required by habits
+of magnificence, a taste of rare purity and cultivation, a love of
+travel, a scholar’s instinct to collect a splendid library, and,
+moreover, what seemed a magnificent liberality to the distressed. He
+had sought happiness, and not vainly, if a lovely and tender wife, and
+children of fair promise, could insure it. He had, besides, ascended
+above the limit which separates the obscure from the distinguished, and
+had won a stainless reputation in affairs of the widest public
+importance. Not that he was a popular character, or had within him the
+mysterious attributes which are essential to that species of success.
+To the public he was a cold abstraction, wholly destitute of those rich
+lines of personality, that living warmth, and the peculiar faculty of
+stamping his own heart’s impression on a multitude of hearts, by which
+the people recognize their favorites. And it must be owned that, after
+his most intimate associates had done their best to know him
+thoroughly, and love him warmly, they were startled to find how little
+hold he had upon their affections. They approved, they admired, but
+still in those moments when the human spirit most craves reality, they
+shrank back from Gervayse Hastings, as powerless to give them what they
+sought. It was the feeling of distrustful regret with which we should
+draw back the hand after extending it, in an illusive twilight, to
+grasp the hand of a shadow upon the wall.
+
+As the superficial fervency of youth decayed, this peculiar effect of
+Gervayse Hastings’s character grew more perceptible. His children, when
+he extended his arms, came coldly to his knees, but never climbed them
+of their own accord. His wife wept secretly, and almost adjudged
+herself a criminal because she shivered in the chill of his bosom. He,
+too, occasionally appeared not unconscious of the chillness of his
+moral atmosphere, and willing, if it might be so, to warm himself at a
+kindly fire. But age stole onward and benumbed him snore and more. As
+the hoar-frost began to gather on him his wife went to her grave, and
+was doubtless warmer there; his children either died or were scattered
+to different homes of their own; and old Gervayse Hastings, unscathed
+by grief,—alone, but needing no companionship,—continued his steady
+walk through life, and still one very Christmas day attended at the
+dismal banquet. His privilege as a guest had become prescriptive now.
+Had he claimed the head of the table, even the skeleton would have been
+ejected from its seat.
+
+Finally, at the merry Christmas-tide, when he had numbered fourscore
+years complete, this pale, highbrowed, marble-featured old man once
+more entered the long-frequented hall, with the same impassive aspect
+that had called forth so much dissatisfied remark at his first
+attendance. Time, except in matters merely external, had done nothing
+for him, either of good or evil. As he took his place he threw a calm,
+inquiring glance around the table, as if to ascertain whether any guest
+had yet appeared, after so many unsuccessful banquets, who might impart
+to him the mystery—the deep, warm secret—the life within the
+life—which, whether manifested in joy or sorrow, is what gives
+substance to a world of shadows.
+
+“My friends,” said Gervayse Hastings, assuming a position which his
+long conversance with the festival caused to appear natural, “you are
+welcome! I drink to you all in this cup of sepulchral wine.”
+
+The guests replied courteously, but still in a manner that proved them
+unable to receive the old man as a member of their sad fraternity. It
+may be well to give the reader an idea of the present company at the
+banquet.
+
+One was formerly a clergyman, enthusiastic in his profession, and
+apparently of the genuine dynasty of those old Puritan divines whose
+faith in their calling, and stern exercise of it, had placed them among
+the mighty of the earth. But yielding to the speculative tendency of
+the age, he had gone astray from the firm foundation of an ancient
+faith, and wandered into a cloud-region, where everything was misty and
+deceptive, ever mocking him with a semblance of reality, but still
+dissolving when he flung himself upon it for support and rest. His
+instinct and early training demanded something steadfast; but, looking
+forward, he beheld vapors piled on vapors, and behind him an impassable
+gulf between the man of yesterday and to-day, on the borders of which
+he paced to and fro, sometimes wringing his hands in agony, and often
+making his own woe a theme of scornful merriment. This surely was a
+miserable man. Next, there was a theorist,—one of a numerous tribe,
+although he deemed himself unique since the creation,—a theorist, who
+had conceived a plan by which all the wretchedness of earth, moral and
+physical, might be done away, and the bliss of the millennium at once
+accomplished. But, the incredulity of mankind debarring him from
+action, he was smitten with as much grief as if the whole mass of woe
+which he was denied the opportunity to remedy were crowded into his own
+bosom. A plain old man in black attracted much of the company’s notice,
+on the supposition that he was no other than Father Miller, who, it
+seemed, had given himself up to despair at the tedious delay of the
+final conflagration. Then there was a man distinguished for native
+pride and obstinacy, who, a little while before, had possessed immense
+wealth, and held the control of a vast moneyed interest which he had
+wielded in the same spirit as a despotic monarch would wield the power
+of his empire, carrying on a tremendous moral warfare, the roar and
+tremor of which was felt at every fireside in the land. At length came
+a crushing ruin,—a total overthrow of fortune, power, and
+character,—the effect of which on his imperious and, in many respects,
+noble and lofty nature might have entitled him to a place, not merely
+at our festival, but among the peers of Pandemonium.
+
+There was a modern philanthropist, who had become so deeply sensible of
+the calamities of thousands and millions of his fellow-creatures, and
+of the impracticableness of any general measures for their relief, that
+he had no heart to do what little good lay immediately within his
+power, but contented himself with being miserable for sympathy. Near
+him sat a gentleman in a predicament hitherto unprecedented, but of
+which the present epoch probably affords numerous examples. Ever since
+he was of capacity to read a newspaper, this person had prided himself
+on his consistent adherence to one political party, but, in the
+confusion of these latter days, had got bewildered and knew not
+whereabouts his party was. This wretched condition, so morally desolate
+and disheartening to a man who has long accustomed himself to merge his
+individuality in the mass of a great body, can only be conceived by
+such as have experienced it. His next companion was a popular orator
+who had lost his voice, and—as it was pretty much all that he had to
+lose—had fallen into a state of hopeless melancholy. The table was
+likewise graced by two of the gentler sex,—one, a half-starved,
+consumptive seamstress, the representative of thousands just as
+wretched; the other, a woman of unemployed energy, who found herself in
+the world with nothing to achieve, nothing to enjoy, and nothing even
+to suffer. She had, therefore, driven herself to the verge of madness
+by dark broodings over the wrongs of her sex, and its exclusion from a
+proper field of action. The roll of guests being thus complete, a
+side-table had been set for three or four disappointed office-seekers,
+with hearts as sick as death, whom the stewards had admitted partly
+because their calamities really entitled them to entrance here, and
+partly that they were in especial need of a good dinner. There was
+likewise a homeless dog, with his tail between his legs, licking up the
+crumbs and gnawing the fragments of the feast,—such a melancholy cur as
+one sometimes sees about the streets without a master, and willing to
+follow the first that will accept his service.
+
+In their own way, these were as wretched a set of people as ever had
+assembled at the festival. There they sat, with the veiled skeleton of
+the founder holding aloft the cypress-wreath, at one end of the table,
+and at the other, wrapped in furs, the withered figure of Gervayse
+Hastings, stately, calm, and cold, impressing the company with awe, yet
+so little interesting their sympathy that he might have vanished into
+thin air without their once exclaiming, “Whither is he gone?”
+
+“Sir,” said the philanthropist, addressing the old man, “you have been
+so long a guest at this annual festival, and have thus been conversant
+with so many varieties of human affliction, that, not improbably, you
+have thence derived some great and important lessons. How blessed were
+your lot could you reveal a secret by which all this mass of woe might
+be removed!”
+
+“I know of but one misfortune,” answered Gervayse Hastings, quietly,
+“and that is my own.”
+
+“Your own!” rejoined the philanthropist. “And looking back on your
+serene and prosperous life, how can you claim to be the sole
+unfortunate of the human race?”
+
+“You will not understand it,” replied Gervayse Hastings, feebly, and
+with a singular inefficiency of pronunciation, and sometimes putting
+one word for another. “None have understood it, not even those who
+experience the like. It is a chillness, a want of earnestness, a
+feeling as if what should be my heart were a thing of vapor, a haunting
+perception of unreality! Thus seeming to possess all that other men
+have, all that men aim at, I have really possessed nothing, neither joy
+nor griefs. All things, all persons,—as was truly said to me at this
+table long and long ago,—have been like shadows flickering on the wall.
+It was so with my wife and children, with those who seemed my friends:
+it is so with yourselves, whom I see now before one. Neither have I
+myself any real existence, but am a shadow like the rest.”
+
+“And how is it with your views of a future life?” inquired the
+speculative clergyman.
+
+“Worse than with you,” said the old man, in a hollow and feeble tone;
+“for I cannot conceive it earnestly enough to feel either hope or fear.
+Mine,—mine is the wretchedness! This cold heart,—this unreal life! Ah!
+it grows colder still.”
+
+It so chanced that at this juncture the decayed ligaments of the
+skeleton gave way, and the dry hones fell together in a heap, thus
+causing the dusty wreath of cypress to drop upon the table. The
+attention of the company being thus diverted for a single instant from
+Gervayse Hastings, they perceived, on turning again towards him, that
+the old man had undergone a change. His shadow had ceased to flicker on
+the wall.
+
+
+“Well, Rosina, what is your criticism?” asked Roderick, as he rolled up
+the manuscript.
+
+“Frankly, your success is by no means complete,” replied she. “It is
+true, I have an idea of the character you endeavor to describe; but it
+is rather by dint of my own thought than your expression.”
+
+“That is unavoidable,” observed the sculptor, “because the
+characteristics are all negative. If Gervayse Hastings could have
+imbibed one human grief at the gloomy banquet, the task of describing
+him would have been infinitely easier. Of such persons—and we do meet
+with these moral monsters now and then—it is difficult to conceive how
+they came to exist here, or what there is in them capable of existence
+hereafter. They seem to be on the outside of everything; and nothing
+wearies the soul more than an attempt to comprehend them within its
+grasp.”
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET ***
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the
+United States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
+the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
+of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
+copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
+easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
+of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
+Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away--you may
+do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
+by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
+license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country other than the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
+  you are located before using this eBook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm website
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that:
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
+the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
+forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
+Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
+to date contact information can be found at the Foundation's website
+and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without
+widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This website includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
diff --git a/9228-0.zip b/9228-0.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a208700
--- /dev/null
+++ b/9228-0.zip
diff --git a/9228-h.zip b/9228-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b8f5873
--- /dev/null
+++ b/9228-h.zip
diff --git a/9228-h/9228-h.htm b/9228-h/9228-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ace8a8c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/9228-h/9228-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,1297 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Christmas Banquet, by Nathaniel Hawthorne</title>
+
+<style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+body { margin-left: 20%;
+       margin-right: 20%;
+       text-align: justify; }
+
+h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 {text-align: center; font-style: normal; font-weight:
+normal; line-height: 1.5; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;}
+
+h1 {font-size: 300%;
+    margin-top: 0.6em;
+    margin-bottom: 0.6em;
+    letter-spacing: 0.12em;
+    word-spacing: 0.2em;
+    text-indent: 0em;}
+h2 {font-size: 150%; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1em;}
+h3 {font-size: 130%; margin-top: 1em;}
+h4 {font-size: 120%;}
+h5 {font-size: 110%;}
+
+.no-break {page-break-before: avoid;} /* for epubs */
+
+div.chapter {page-break-before: always; margin-top: 4em;}
+
+hr {width: 80%; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 2em;}
+
+p {text-indent: 1em;
+   margin-top: 0.25em;
+   margin-bottom: 0.25em; }
+
+.p2 {margin-top: 2em;}
+
+a:link {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+a:visited {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+a:hover {color:red}
+
+</style>
+</head>
+<body>
+
+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Christmas Banquet, by Nathaniel Hawthorne</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The Christmas Banquet</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: September 6, 2003 [eBook #9228]<br />
+[Most recently updated: November 9, 2022]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: David Widger and Al Haines</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET ***</div>
+
+<h1>The Christmas Banquet</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Nathaniel Hawthorne</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h4>FROM THE UNPUBLISHED “ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART.”</h4>
+
+<p>
+“I have here attempted,” said Roderick, unfolding a few sheets of manuscript,
+as he sat with Rosina and the sculptor in the summer-house,&mdash;“I have
+attempted to seize hold of a personage who glides past me, occasionally, in my
+walk through life. My former sad experience, as you know, has gifted me with
+some degree of insight into the gloomy mysteries of the human heart, through
+which I have wandered like one astray in a dark cavern, with his torch fast
+flickering to extinction. But this man, this class of men, is a hopeless
+puzzle.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, but propound him,” said the sculptor. “Let us have an idea of hint, to
+begin with.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, indeed,” replied Roderick, “he is such a being as I could conceive you to
+carve out of marble, and some yet unrealized perfection of human science to
+endow with an exquisite mockery of intellect; but still there lacks the last
+inestimable touch of a divine Creator. He looks like a man; and, perchance,
+like a better specimen of man than you ordinarily meet. You might esteem him
+wise; he is capable of cultivation and refinement, and has at least an external
+conscience; but the demands that spirit makes upon spirit are precisely those
+to which he cannot respond. When at last you come close to him you find him
+chill and unsubstantial,&mdash;a mere vapor.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I believe,” said Rosina, “I have a glimmering idea of what you mean.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then be thankful,” answered her husband, smiling; “but do not anticipate any
+further illumination from what I am about to read. I have here imagined such a
+man to be&mdash;what, probably, he never is&mdash;conscious of the deficiency
+in his spiritual organization. Methinks the result would be a sense of cold
+unreality wherewith he would go shivering through the world, longing to
+exchange his load of ice for any burden of real grief that fate could fling
+upon a human being.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Contenting himself with this preface, Roderick began to read.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+
+In a certain old gentleman’s last will and testament there appeared a bequest,
+which, as his final thought and deed, was singularly in keeping with a long
+life of melancholy eccentricity. He devised a considerable sum for establishing
+a fund, the interest of which was to be expended, annually forever, in
+preparing a Christmas Banquet for ten of the most miserable persons that could
+be found. It seemed not to be the testator’s purpose to make these half a score
+of sad hearts merry, but to provide that the stern or fierce expression of
+human discontent should not be drowned, even for that one holy and joyful day,
+amid the acclamations of festal gratitude which all Christendom sends up. And
+he desired, likewise, to perpetuate his own remonstrance against the earthly
+course of Providence, and his sad and sour dissent from those systems of
+religion or philosophy which either find sunshine in the world or draw it down
+from heaven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The task of inviting the guests, or of selecting among such as might advance
+their claims to partake of this dismal hospitality, was confided to the two
+trustees or stewards of the fund. These gentlemen, like their deceased friend,
+were sombre humorists, who made it their principal occupation to number the
+sable threads in the web of human life, and drop all the golden ones out of the
+reckoning. They performed their present office with integrity and judgment. The
+aspect of the assembled company, on the day of the first festival, might not,
+it is true, have satisfied every beholder that these were especially the
+individuals, chosen forth from all the world, whose griefs were worthy to stand
+as indicators of the mass of human suffering. Yet, after due consideration, it
+could not be disputed that here was a variety of hopeless discomfort, which, if
+it sometimes arose from causes apparently inadequate, was thereby only the
+shrewder imputation against the nature and mechanism of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The arrangements and decorations of the banquet were probably intended to
+signify that death in life which had been the testator’s definition of
+existence. The hall, illuminated by torches, was hung round with curtains of
+deep and dusky purple, and adorned with branches of cypress and wreaths of
+artificial flowers, imitative of such as used to be strewn over the dead. A
+sprig of parsley was laid by every plate. The main reservoir of wine, was a
+sepulchral urn of silver, whence the liquor was distributed around the table in
+small vases, accurately copied from those that held the tears of ancient
+mourners. Neither had the stewards&mdash;if it were their taste that arranged
+these details&mdash;forgotten the fantasy of the old Egyptians, who seated a
+skeleton at every festive board, and mocked their own merriment with the
+imperturbable grin of a death’s-head. Such a fearful guest, shrouded in a black
+mantle, sat now at the head of the table. It was whispered, I know not with
+what truth, that the testator himself had once walked the visible world with
+the machinery of that sane skeleton, and that it was one of the stipulations of
+his will, that he should thus be permitted to sit, from year to year, at the
+banquet which he had instituted. If so, it was perhaps covertly implied that he
+had cherished no hopes of bliss beyond the grave to compensate for the evils
+which he felt or imagined here. And if, in their bewildered conjectures as to
+the purpose of earthly existence, the banqueters should throw aside the veil,
+and cast an inquiring glance at this figure of death, as seeking thence the
+solution otherwise unattainable, the only reply would be a stare of the vacant
+eye-caverns and a grin of the skeleton jaws. Such was the response that the
+dead man had fancied himself to receive when he asked of Death to solve the
+riddle of his life; and it was his desire to repeat it when the guests of his
+dismal hospitality should find themselves perplexed with the same question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What means that wreath?” asked several of the company, while viewing the
+decorations of the table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They alluded to a wreath of cypress, which was held on high by a skeleton arm,
+protruding from within the black mantle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is a crown,” said one of the stewards, “not for the worthiest, but for the
+wofulest, when he shall prove his claim to it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The guest earliest bidden to the festival was a man of soft and gentle
+character, who had not energy to struggle against the heavy despondency to
+which his temperament rendered him liable; and therefore with nothing outwardly
+to excuse him from happiness, he had spent a life of quiet misery that made his
+blood torpid, and weighed upon his breath, and sat like a ponderous night-fiend
+upon every throb of his unresisting heart. His wretchedness seemed as deep as
+his original nature, if not identical with it. It was the misfortune of a
+second guest to cherish within his bosom a diseased heart, which had become so
+wretchedly sore that the continual and unavoidable rubs of the world, the blow
+of an enemy, the careless jostle of a stranger, and even the faithful and
+loving touch of a friend, alike made ulcers in it. As is the habit of people
+thus afflicted, he found his chief employment in exhibiting these miserable
+sores to any who would give themselves the pain of viewing them. A third guest
+was a hypochondriac, whose imagination wrought necromancy in his outward and
+inward world, and caused him to see monstrous faces in the household fire, and
+dragons in the clouds of sunset, and fiends in the guise of beautiful women,
+and something ugly or wicked beneath all the pleasant surfaces of nature. His
+neighbor at table was one who, in his early youth, had trusted mankind too
+much, and hoped too highly in their behalf, and, in meeting with many
+disappointments, had become desperately soured. For several years back this
+misanthrope bad employed himself in accumulating motives for hating and
+despising his race,&mdash;such as murder, lust, treachery, ingratitude,
+faithlessness of trusted friends, instinctive vices of children, impurity of
+women, hidden guilt in men of saint-like aspect,&mdash;and, in short, all
+manner of black realities that sought to decorate themselves with outward grace
+or glory. But at every atrocious fact that was added to his catalogue, at every
+increase of the sad knowledge which he spent his life to collect, the native
+impulses of the poor man’s loving and confiding heart made him groan with
+anguish. Next, with his heavy brow bent downward, there stole into the hall a
+man naturally earnest and impassioned, who, from his immemorial infancy, had
+felt the consciousness of a high message to the world; but, essaying to deliver
+it, had found either no voice or form of speech, or else no ears to listen.
+Therefore his whole life was a bitter questioning of himself: “Why have not men
+acknowledged my mission? Am I not a self-deluding fool? What business have I on
+earth? Where is my grave?” Throughout the festival, he quaffed frequent
+draughts from the sepulchral urn of wine, hoping thus to quench the celestial
+fire that tortured his own breast and could not benefit his race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then there entered, having flung away a ticket for a ball, a gay gallant of
+yesterday, who had found four or five wrinkles in his brow, and more gray hairs
+than he could well number on his head. Endowed with sense and feeling, he had
+nevertheless spent his youth in folly, but had reached at last that dreary
+point in life where Folly quits us of her own accord, leaving us to make
+friends with Wisdom if we can. Thus, cold and desolate, he had come to seek
+Wisdom at the banquet, and wondered if the skeleton were she. To eke out the
+company, the stewards had invited a distressed poet from his home in the
+almshouse, and a melancholy idiot from the street-corner. The latter had just
+the glimmering of sense that was sufficient to make him conscious of a vacancy,
+which the poor fellow, all his life long, had mistily sought to fill up with
+intelligence, wandering up and down the streets, and groaning miserably because
+his attempts were ineffectual. The only lady in the hall was one who had fallen
+short of absolute and perfect beauty, merely by the trifling defect of a slight
+cast in her left eye. But this blemish, minute as it was, so shocked the pure
+ideal of her soul, rather than her vanity, that she passed her life in
+solitude, and veiled her countenance even from her own gaze. So the skeleton
+sat shrouded at one end of the table, and this poor lady at the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One other guest remains to be described. He was a young man of smooth brow,
+fair cheek, and fashionable mien. So far as his exterior developed him, he
+might much more suitably have found a place at some merry Christmas table, than
+have been numbered among the blighted, fate-stricken, fancy-tortured set of
+ill-starred banqueters. Murmurs arose among the guests as they noted, the
+glance of general scrutiny which the intruder threw over his companions. What
+had he to do among them? Why did not the skeleton of the dead founder of the
+feast unbend its rattling joints, arise, and motion the unwelcome stranger from
+the board?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Shameful!” said the morbid man, while a new ulcer broke out in his heart. “He
+comes to mock us! we shall be the jest of his tavern friends I&mdash;he will
+make a farce of our miseries, and bring it out upon the stage!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“O, never mind him!” said the hypochondriac, smiling sourly. “He shall feast
+from yonder tureen of viper-soup; and if there is a fricassee of scorpions on
+the table, pray let him have his share of it. For the dessert, he shall taste
+the apples of Sodom, then, if he like our Christmas fare, let him return again
+next year!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Trouble him not,” murmured the melancholy man, with gentleness. “What matters
+it whether the consciousness of misery come a few years sooner or later? If
+this youth deem himself happy now, yet let him sit with us for the sake of the
+wretchedness to come.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The poor idiot approached the young man with that mournful aspect of vacant
+inquiry which his face continually wore, and which caused people to say that he
+was always in search of his missing wits. After no little examination he
+touched the stranger’s hand, but immediately drew back his own, shaking his
+head and shivering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Cold, cold, cold!” muttered the idiot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young man shivered too, and smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Gentlemen, and you, madam,” said one of the stewards of the festival, “do not
+conceive so ill either of our caution or judgment, as to imagine that we have
+admitted this young stranger&mdash;Gervayse Hastings by name&mdash;without a
+full investigation and thoughtful balance of his claims. Trust me, not a guest
+at the table is better entitled to his seat.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The steward’s guaranty was perforce satisfactory. The company, therefore, took
+their places, and addressed themselves to the serious business of the feast,
+but were soon disturbed by the hypochondriac, who thrust back his chair,
+complaining that a dish of stewed toads and vipers was set before him, and that
+there was green ditchwater in his cup of wine. This mistake being amended, he
+quietly resumed his seat. The wine, as it flowed freely from the sepulchral
+urn, seemed to come imbued with all gloomy inspirations; so that its influence
+was not to cheer, but either to sink the revellers into a deeper melancholy, or
+elevate their spirits to an enthusiasm of wretchedness. The conversation was
+various. They told sad stories about people who might have been Worthy guests
+at such a festival as the present. They talked of grisly incidents in human
+history; of strange crimes, which, if truly considered, were but convulsions of
+agony; of some lives that had been altogether wretched, and of others, which,
+wearing a general semblance of happiness, had yet been deformed, sooner or
+later, by misfortune, as by the intrusion of a grim face at a banquet; of
+death-bed scenes, and what dark intimations might be gathered from the words of
+dying men; of suicide, and whether the more eligible mode were by halter,
+knife, poison, drowning, gradual starvation, or the fumes of charcoal. The
+majority of the guests, as is the custom with people thoroughly and profoundly
+sick at heart, were anxious to make their own woes the theme of discussion, and
+prove themselves most excellent in anguish. The misanthropist went deep into
+the philosophy of evil, and wandered about in the darkness, with now and then a
+gleam of discolored light hovering on ghastly shapes and horrid scenery. Many a
+miserable thought, such as men have stumbled upon from age to age, did he now
+rake up again, and gloat over it as an inestimable gem, a diamond, a treasure
+far preferable to those bright, spiritual revelations of a better world, which
+are like precious stones from heaven’s pavement. And then, amid his lore of
+wretchedness he hid his face and wept.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a festival at which the woful man of Uz might suitably have been a
+guest, together with all, in each succeeding age, who have tasted deepest of
+the bitterness of life. And be it said, too, that every son or daughter of
+woman, however favored with happy fortune, might, at one sad moment or another,
+have claimed the privilege of a stricken heart, to sit down at this table. But,
+throughout the feast, it was remarked that the young stranger, Gervayse
+Hastings, was unsuccessful in his attempts to catch its pervading spirit. At
+any deep, strong thought that found utterance, and which was torn out, as it
+were, from the saddest recesses of human consciousness, he looked mystified and
+bewildered; even more than the poor idiot, who seemed to grasp at such things
+with his earnest heart, and thus occasionally to comprehend them. The young
+man’s conversation was of a colder and lighter kind, often brilliant, but
+lacking the powerful characteristics of a nature that had been developed by
+suffering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir,” said the misanthropist, bluntly, in reply to some observation by
+Gervayse Hastings, “pray do not address me again. We have no right to talk
+together. Our minds have nothing in common. By what claim you appear at this
+banquet I cannot guess; but methinks, to a man who could say what you have just
+now said, my companions and myself must seem no more than shadows flickering on
+the wall. And precisely such a shadow are you to us.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young man smiled and bowed, but, drawing himself back in his chair, he
+buttoned his coat over his breast, as if the banqueting-ball were growing
+chill. Again the idiot fixed his melancholy stare upon the youth, and murmured,
+“Cold! cold! cold!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The banquet drew to its conclusion, and the guests departed. Scarcely had they
+stepped across the threshold of the hall, when the scene that had there passed
+seemed like the vision of a sick fancy, or an exhalation from a stagnant heart.
+Now and then, however, during the year that ensued, these melancholy people
+caught glimpses of one another, transient, indeed, but enough to prove that
+they walked the earth with the ordinary allotment of reality. Sometimes a pair
+of them came face to face, while stealing through the evening twilight,
+enveloped in their sable cloaks. Sometimes they casually met in churchyards.
+Once, also, it happened that two of the dismal banqueters mutually started at
+recognizing each other in the noonday sunshine of a crowded street, stalking
+there like ghosts astray. Doubtless they wondered why the skeleton did not come
+abroad at noonday too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But whenever the necessity of their affairs compelled these Christmas guests
+into the bustling world, they were sure to encounter the young man who had so
+unaccountably been admitted to the festival. They saw him among the gay and
+fortunate; they caught the sunny sparkle of his eye; they heard the light and
+careless tones of his voice, and muttered to themselves with such indignation
+as only the aristocracy of wretchedness could kindle, “The traitor! The vile
+impostor! Providence, in its own good time, may give him a right to feast among
+us!” But the young man’s unabashed eye dwelt upon their gloomy figures as they
+passed him, seeming to say, perchance with somewhat of a sneer, “First, know my
+secret then, measure your claims with mine!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The step of Time stole onward, and soon brought merry Christmas round again,
+with glad and solemn worship in the churches, and sports, games, festivals, and
+everywhere the bright face of Joy beside the household fire. Again likewise the
+hall, with its curtains of dusky purple, was illuminated by the death-torches
+gleaming on the sepulchral decorations of the banquet. The veiled, skeleton sat
+in state, lifting the cypress-wreath above its head, as the guerdon of some
+guest illustrious in the qualifications which there claimed precedence. As the
+stewards deemed the world inexhaustible in misery, and were desirous of
+recognizing it in all its forms, they had not seen fit to reassemble the
+company of the former year. New faces now threw their gloom across the table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a man of nice conscience, who bore a blood-stain in his
+heart&mdash;the death of a fellow-creature&mdash;which, for his more exquisite
+torture, had chanced with such a peculiarity of circumstances, that he could
+not absolutely determine whether his will had entered into the deed or not.
+Therefore, his whole life was spent in the agony of an inward trial for murder,
+with a continual sifting of the details of his terrible calamity, until his
+mind had no longer any thought, nor his soul any emotion, disconnected with it,
+There was a mother, too,&mdash;a mother once, but a desolation now,&mdash;who,
+many years before, had gone out on a pleasure-party, and, returning, found her
+infant smothered in its little bed. And ever since she has been tortured with
+the fantasy that her buried baby lay smothering in its coffin. Then there was
+an aged lady, who had lived from time immemorial with a constant tremor
+quivering through her-frame. It was terrible to discern her dark shadow
+tremulous upon the wall; her lips, likewise, were tremulous; and the expression
+of her eye seemed to indicate that her soul was trembling too. Owing to the
+bewilderment and confusion which made almost a chaos of her intellect, it was
+impossible to discover what dire misfortune had thus shaken her nature to its
+depths; so that the stewards had admitted her to the table, not from any
+acquaintance with her history, but on the safe testimony of her miserable
+aspect. Some surprise was expressed at the presence of a bluff, red-faced
+gentleman, a certain Mr. Smith, who had evidently the fat of many a rich feast
+within him, and the habitual twinkle of whose eye betrayed a disposition to
+break forth into uproarious laughter for little cause or none. It turned out,
+however, that, with the best possible flow of spirits, our poor friend was
+afflicted with a physical disease of the heart, which threatened instant death
+on the slightest cachinnatory indulgence, or even that titillation of the
+bodily frame produced by merry thoughts. In this dilemma he had sought
+admittance to the banquet, on the ostensible plea of his irksome and miserable
+state, but, in reality, with the hope of imbibing a life-preserving melancholy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A married couple had been invited from a motive of bitter humor, it being well
+understood that they rendered each other unutterably miserable whenever they
+chanced to meet, and therefore must necessarily be fit associates at the
+festival. In contrast with these was another couple still unmarried, who had
+interchanged their hearts in early life, but had been divided by circumstances
+as impalpable as morning mist, and kept apart so long that their spirits now
+found it impossible to meet, Therefore, yearning for communion, yet shrinking
+from one another and choosing none beside, they felt themselves companionless
+in life, and looked upon eternity as a boundless desert. Next to the skeleton
+sat a mere son of earth,&mdash;a hunter of the Exchange,&mdash;a gatherer of
+shining dust,&mdash;a man whose life’s record was in his ledger, and whose
+soul’s prison-house the vaults of the bank where he kept his deposits. This
+person had been greatly perplexed at his invitation, deeming himself one of the
+most fortunate men in the city; but the stewards persisted in demanding his
+presence, assuring him that he had no conception how miserable he was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now appeared a figure which we must acknowledge as our acquaintance of the
+former festival. It was Gervayse Hastings, whose presence had then caused so
+much question and criticism, and who now took his place with the composure of
+one whose claims were satisfactory to himself and must needs be allowed by
+others. Yet his easy and unruffled face betrayed no sorrow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The well-skilled beholders gazed a moment into his eyes and shook their heads,
+to miss the unuttered sympathy&mdash;the countersign never to be
+falsified&mdash;of those whose hearts are cavern-mouths through which they
+descend into a region of illimitable woe and recognize other wanderers there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who is this youth?” asked the man with a bloodstain on his conscience. “Surely
+he has never gone down into the depths! I know all the aspects of those who
+have passed through the dark valley. By what right is he among us?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, it is a sinful thing to come hither without a sorrow,” murmured the aged
+lady, in accents that partook of the eternal tremor which pervaded her whole
+being “Depart, young man! Your soul has never been shaken, and, therefore, I
+tremble so much the more to look at you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“His soul shaken! No; I’ll answer for it,” said bluff Mr. Smith, pressing his
+hand upon his heart and making himself as melancholy as he could, for fear of a
+fatal explosion of laughter. “I know the lad well; he has as fair prospects as
+any young man about town, and has no more right among us miserable creatures
+than the child unborn. He never was miserable and probably never will be!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Our honored guests,” interposed the stewards, “pray have patience with us, and
+believe, at least, that our deep veneration for the sacredness of this
+solemnity would preclude any wilful violation of it. Receive this young man to
+your table. It may not be too much to say, that no guest here would exchange
+his own heart for the one that beats within that youthful bosom!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’d call it a bargain, and gladly, too,” muttered Mr. Smith, with a perplexing
+mixture of sadness and mirthful conceit. “A plague upon their nonsense! My own
+heart is the only really miserable one in the company; it will certainly be the
+death of me at last!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, as on the former occasion, the judgment of the stewards being
+without appeal, the company sat down. The obnoxious guest made no more attempt
+to obtrude his conversation on those about him, but appeared to listen to the
+table-talk with peculiar assiduity, as if some inestimable secret, otherwise
+beyond his reach, might be conveyed in a casual word. And in truth, to those
+who could understand and value it, there was rich matter in the upgushings and
+outpourings of these initiated souls to whom sorrow had been a talisman,
+admitting them into spiritual depths which no other spell can open. Sometimes
+out of the midst of densest gloom there flashed a momentary radiance, pure as
+crystal, bright as the flame of stars, and shedding such a glow upon the
+mysteries of life, that the guests were ready to exclaim, “Surely the riddle is
+on the point of being solved!” At such illuminated intervals the saddest
+mourners felt it to be revealed that mortal griefs are but shadowy and
+external; no more than the sable robes voluminously shrouding a certain divine
+reality, and thus indicating what might otherwise be altogether invisible to
+mortal eye.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just now,” remarked the trembling old woman, “I seemed to see beyond the
+outside. And then my everlasting tremor passed away!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Would that I could dwell always in these momentary gleams of light!” said the
+man of stricken conscience. “Then the blood-stain in my heart would be washed
+clean away.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This strain of conversation appeared so unintelligibly absurd to good Mr.
+Smith, that he burst into precisely the fit of laughter which his physicians
+had warned him against, as likely to prove instantaneously fatal. In effect, he
+fell back in his chair a corpse, with a broad grin upon his face, while his
+ghost, perchance, remained beside it bewildered at its unpremeditated exit.
+This catastrophe of course broke up the festival.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How is this? You do not tremble!” observed the tremulous old woman to Gervayse
+Hastings, who was gazing at the dead man with singular intentness. “Is it not
+awful to see him so suddenly vanish out of the midst of life,&mdash;this man of
+flesh and blood, whose earthly nature was so warm and strong? There is a
+never-ending tremor in my soul, but it trembles afresh at, this! And you are
+calm!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Would that he could teach me somewhat!” said Gervayse Hastings, drawing a long
+breath. “Men pass before me like shadows on the wall; their actions, passions,
+feelings, are flickerings of the light, and then they vanish! Neither the
+corpse, nor yonder skeleton, nor this old woman’s everlasting tremor, can give
+me what I seek.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then the company departed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We cannot linger to narrate, in such detail, more circumstances of these
+singular festivals, which, in accordance with the founder’s will, continued to
+be kept with the regularity of an established institution. In process of time
+the stewards adopted the custom of inviting, from far and near, those
+individuals whose misfortunes were prominent above other men’s, and whose
+mental and moral development might, therefore, be supposed to possess a
+corresponding interest. The exiled noble of the French Revolution, and the
+broken soldier of the Empire, were alike represented at the table. Fallen
+monarchs, wandering about the earth, have found places at that forlorn and
+miserable feast. The statesman, when his party flung him off, might, if he
+chose it, be once more a great man for the space of a single banquet. Aaron
+Burr’s name appears on the record at a period when his ruin&mdash;the
+profoundest and most striking, with more of moral circumstance in it than that
+of almost any other man&mdash;was complete in his lonely age. Stephen Guard,
+when his wealth weighed upon him like a mountain, once sought admittance of his
+own accord. It is not probable, however, that these men had any lesson to teach
+in the lore of discontent and misery which might not equally well have been
+studied in the common walks of life. Illustrious unfortunates attract a wider
+sympathy, not because their griefs are more intense, but because, being set on
+lofty pedestals, they the better serve mankind as instances and bywords of
+calamity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It concerns our present purpose to say that, at each successive festival,
+Gervayse Hastings showed his face, gradually changing from the smooth beauty of
+his youth to the thoughtful comeliness of manhood, and thence to the bald,
+impressive dignity of age. He was the only individual invariably present. Yet
+on every occasion there were murmurs, both from those who knew his character
+and position, and from them whose hearts shrank back as denying his
+companionship in their mystic fraternity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who is this impassive man?” had been asked a hundred times. “Has he suffered?
+Has he sinned? There are no traces of either. Then wherefore is he here?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You must inquire of the stewards or of himself,” was the constant reply. “We
+seem to know him well here in our city, and know nothing of him but what is
+creditable and fortunate. Yet hither he comes, year after year, to this gloomy
+banquet, and sits among the guests like a marble statue. Ask yonder skeleton,
+perhaps that may solve the riddle!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in truth a wonder. The life of Gervayse Hastings was not merely a
+prosperous, but a brilliant one. Everything had gone well with him. He was
+wealthy, far beyond the expenditure that was required by habits of
+magnificence, a taste of rare purity and cultivation, a love of travel, a
+scholar’s instinct to collect a splendid library, and, moreover, what seemed a
+magnificent liberality to the distressed. He had sought happiness, and not
+vainly, if a lovely and tender wife, and children of fair promise, could insure
+it. He had, besides, ascended above the limit which separates the obscure from
+the distinguished, and had won a stainless reputation in affairs of the widest
+public importance. Not that he was a popular character, or had within him the
+mysterious attributes which are essential to that species of success. To the
+public he was a cold abstraction, wholly destitute of those rich lines of
+personality, that living warmth, and the peculiar faculty of stamping his own
+heart’s impression on a multitude of hearts, by which the people recognize
+their favorites. And it must be owned that, after his most intimate associates
+had done their best to know him thoroughly, and love him warmly, they were
+startled to find how little hold he had upon their affections. They approved,
+they admired, but still in those moments when the human spirit most craves
+reality, they shrank back from Gervayse Hastings, as powerless to give them
+what they sought. It was the feeling of distrustful regret with which we should
+draw back the hand after extending it, in an illusive twilight, to grasp the
+hand of a shadow upon the wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the superficial fervency of youth decayed, this peculiar effect of Gervayse
+Hastings’s character grew more perceptible. His children, when he extended his
+arms, came coldly to his knees, but never climbed them of their own accord. His
+wife wept secretly, and almost adjudged herself a criminal because she shivered
+in the chill of his bosom. He, too, occasionally appeared not unconscious of
+the chillness of his moral atmosphere, and willing, if it might be so, to warm
+himself at a kindly fire. But age stole onward and benumbed him snore and more.
+As the hoar-frost began to gather on him his wife went to her grave, and was
+doubtless warmer there; his children either died or were scattered to different
+homes of their own; and old Gervayse Hastings, unscathed by grief,&mdash;alone,
+but needing no companionship,&mdash;continued his steady walk through life, and
+still one very Christmas day attended at the dismal banquet. His privilege as a
+guest had become prescriptive now. Had he claimed the head of the table, even
+the skeleton would have been ejected from its seat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally, at the merry Christmas-tide, when he had numbered fourscore years
+complete, this pale, highbrowed, marble-featured old man once more entered the
+long-frequented hall, with the same impassive aspect that had called forth so
+much dissatisfied remark at his first attendance. Time, except in matters
+merely external, had done nothing for him, either of good or evil. As he took
+his place he threw a calm, inquiring glance around the table, as if to
+ascertain whether any guest had yet appeared, after so many unsuccessful
+banquets, who might impart to him the mystery&mdash;the deep, warm
+secret&mdash;the life within the life&mdash;which, whether manifested in joy or
+sorrow, is what gives substance to a world of shadows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My friends,” said Gervayse Hastings, assuming a position which his long
+conversance with the festival caused to appear natural, “you are welcome! I
+drink to you all in this cup of sepulchral wine.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The guests replied courteously, but still in a manner that proved them unable
+to receive the old man as a member of their sad fraternity. It may be well to
+give the reader an idea of the present company at the banquet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One was formerly a clergyman, enthusiastic in his profession, and apparently of
+the genuine dynasty of those old Puritan divines whose faith in their calling,
+and stern exercise of it, had placed them among the mighty of the earth. But
+yielding to the speculative tendency of the age, he had gone astray from the
+firm foundation of an ancient faith, and wandered into a cloud-region, where
+everything was misty and deceptive, ever mocking him with a semblance of
+reality, but still dissolving when he flung himself upon it for support and
+rest. His instinct and early training demanded something steadfast; but,
+looking forward, he beheld vapors piled on vapors, and behind him an impassable
+gulf between the man of yesterday and to-day, on the borders of which he paced
+to and fro, sometimes wringing his hands in agony, and often making his own woe
+a theme of scornful merriment. This surely was a miserable man. Next, there was
+a theorist,&mdash;one of a numerous tribe, although he deemed himself unique
+since the creation,&mdash;a theorist, who had conceived a plan by which all the
+wretchedness of earth, moral and physical, might be done away, and the bliss of
+the millennium at once accomplished. But, the incredulity of mankind debarring
+him from action, he was smitten with as much grief as if the whole mass of woe
+which he was denied the opportunity to remedy were crowded into his own bosom.
+A plain old man in black attracted much of the company’s notice, on the
+supposition that he was no other than Father Miller, who, it seemed, had given
+himself up to despair at the tedious delay of the final conflagration. Then
+there was a man distinguished for native pride and obstinacy, who, a little
+while before, had possessed immense wealth, and held the control of a vast
+moneyed interest which he had wielded in the same spirit as a despotic monarch
+would wield the power of his empire, carrying on a tremendous moral warfare,
+the roar and tremor of which was felt at every fireside in the land. At length
+came a crushing ruin,&mdash;a total overthrow of fortune, power, and
+character,&mdash;the effect of which on his imperious and, in many respects,
+noble and lofty nature might have entitled him to a place, not merely at our
+festival, but among the peers of Pandemonium.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a modern philanthropist, who had become so deeply sensible of the
+calamities of thousands and millions of his fellow-creatures, and of the
+impracticableness of any general measures for their relief, that he had no
+heart to do what little good lay immediately within his power, but contented
+himself with being miserable for sympathy. Near him sat a gentleman in a
+predicament hitherto unprecedented, but of which the present epoch probably
+affords numerous examples. Ever since he was of capacity to read a newspaper,
+this person had prided himself on his consistent adherence to one political
+party, but, in the confusion of these latter days, had got bewildered and knew
+not whereabouts his party was. This wretched condition, so morally desolate and
+disheartening to a man who has long accustomed himself to merge his
+individuality in the mass of a great body, can only be conceived by such as
+have experienced it. His next companion was a popular orator who had lost his
+voice, and&mdash;as it was pretty much all that he had to lose&mdash;had fallen
+into a state of hopeless melancholy. The table was likewise graced by two of
+the gentler sex,&mdash;one, a half-starved, consumptive seamstress, the
+representative of thousands just as wretched; the other, a woman of unemployed
+energy, who found herself in the world with nothing to achieve, nothing to
+enjoy, and nothing even to suffer. She had, therefore, driven herself to the
+verge of madness by dark broodings over the wrongs of her sex, and its
+exclusion from a proper field of action. The roll of guests being thus
+complete, a side-table had been set for three or four disappointed
+office-seekers, with hearts as sick as death, whom the stewards had admitted
+partly because their calamities really entitled them to entrance here, and
+partly that they were in especial need of a good dinner. There was likewise a
+homeless dog, with his tail between his legs, licking up the crumbs and gnawing
+the fragments of the feast,&mdash;such a melancholy cur as one sometimes sees
+about the streets without a master, and willing to follow the first that will
+accept his service.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In their own way, these were as wretched a set of people as ever had assembled
+at the festival. There they sat, with the veiled skeleton of the founder
+holding aloft the cypress-wreath, at one end of the table, and at the other,
+wrapped in furs, the withered figure of Gervayse Hastings, stately, calm, and
+cold, impressing the company with awe, yet so little interesting their sympathy
+that he might have vanished into thin air without their once exclaiming,
+“Whither is he gone?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir,” said the philanthropist, addressing the old man, “you have been so long
+a guest at this annual festival, and have thus been conversant with so many
+varieties of human affliction, that, not improbably, you have thence derived
+some great and important lessons. How blessed were your lot could you reveal a
+secret by which all this mass of woe might be removed!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know of but one misfortune,” answered Gervayse Hastings, quietly, “and that
+is my own.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your own!” rejoined the philanthropist. “And looking back on your serene and
+prosperous life, how can you claim to be the sole unfortunate of the human
+race?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You will not understand it,” replied Gervayse Hastings, feebly, and with a
+singular inefficiency of pronunciation, and sometimes putting one word for
+another. “None have understood it, not even those who experience the like. It
+is a chillness, a want of earnestness, a feeling as if what should be my heart
+were a thing of vapor, a haunting perception of unreality! Thus seeming to
+possess all that other men have, all that men aim at, I have really possessed
+nothing, neither joy nor griefs. All things, all persons,&mdash;as was truly
+said to me at this table long and long ago,&mdash;have been like shadows
+flickering on the wall. It was so with my wife and children, with those who
+seemed my friends: it is so with yourselves, whom I see now before one. Neither
+have I myself any real existence, but am a shadow like the rest.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And how is it with your views of a future life?” inquired the speculative
+clergyman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Worse than with you,” said the old man, in a hollow and feeble tone; “for I
+cannot conceive it earnestly enough to feel either hope or fear.
+Mine,&mdash;mine is the wretchedness! This cold heart,&mdash;this unreal life!
+Ah! it grows colder still.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It so chanced that at this juncture the decayed ligaments of the skeleton gave
+way, and the dry hones fell together in a heap, thus causing the dusty wreath
+of cypress to drop upon the table. The attention of the company being thus
+diverted for a single instant from Gervayse Hastings, they perceived, on
+turning again towards him, that the old man had undergone a change. His shadow
+had ceased to flicker on the wall.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+
+“Well, Rosina, what is your criticism?” asked Roderick, as he rolled up the
+manuscript.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Frankly, your success is by no means complete,” replied she. “It is true, I
+have an idea of the character you endeavor to describe; but it is rather by
+dint of my own thought than your expression.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That is unavoidable,” observed the sculptor, “because the characteristics are
+all negative. If Gervayse Hastings could have imbibed one human grief at the
+gloomy banquet, the task of describing him would have been infinitely easier.
+Of such persons&mdash;and we do meet with these moral monsters now and
+then&mdash;it is difficult to conceive how they came to exist here, or what
+there is in them capable of existence hereafter. They seem to be on the outside
+of everything; and nothing wearies the soul more than an attempt to comprehend
+them within its grasp.”
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET ***</div>
+<div style='text-align:left'>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Updated editions will replace the previous one&#8212;the old editions will
+be renamed.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
+States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG&#8482;
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
+the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
+of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
+copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
+easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
+of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
+Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away--you may
+do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
+by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
+license, especially commercial redistribution.
+</div>
+
+<div style='margin:0.83em 0; font-size:1.1em; text-align:center'>START: FULL LICENSE<br />
+<span style='font-size:smaller'>THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE<br />
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK</span>
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+To protect the Project Gutenberg&#8482; mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &#8220;Project
+Gutenberg&#8221;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
+or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.B. &#8220;Project Gutenberg&#8221; is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&#8220;the
+Foundation&#8221; or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg&#8482; mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg&#8482; License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg&#8482; work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country other than the United States.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg&#8482; License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg&#8482; work (any work
+on which the phrase &#8220;Project Gutenberg&#8221; appears, or with which the
+phrase &#8220;Project Gutenberg&#8221; is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+</div>
+
+<blockquote>
+  <div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+    other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+    whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+    of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+    at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+    are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
+    of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
+  </div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase &#8220;Project
+Gutenberg&#8221; associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg&#8482; License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg&#8482;.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; License.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg&#8482; work in a format
+other than &#8220;Plain Vanilla ASCII&#8221; or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg&#8482; website
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original &#8220;Plain
+Vanilla ASCII&#8221; or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg&#8482; License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg&#8482; works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works
+provided that:
+</div>
+
+<div style='margin-left:0.7em;'>
+    <div style='text-indent:-0.7em'>
+        &#8226; You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+        the use of Project Gutenberg&#8482; works calculated using the method
+        you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+        to the owner of the Project Gutenberg&#8482; trademark, but he has
+        agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+        Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+        within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+        legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+        payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+        Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+        Section 4, &#8220;Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+        Literary Archive Foundation.&#8221;
+    </div>
+
+    <div style='text-indent:-0.7em'>
+        &#8226; You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+        you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+        does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+        License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+        copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+        all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+        works.
+    </div>
+
+    <div style='text-indent:-0.7em'>
+        &#8226; You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+        any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+        electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+        receipt of the work.
+    </div>
+
+    <div style='text-indent:-0.7em'>
+        &#8226; You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+        distribution of Project Gutenberg&#8482; works.
+    </div>
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
+the Project Gutenberg&#8482; trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
+forth in Section 3 below.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain &#8220;Defects,&#8221; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &#8220;Right
+of Replacement or Refund&#8221; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you &#8216;AS-IS&#8217;, WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg&#8482; work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg&#8482; work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg&#8482;&#8217;s
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg&#8482; collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg&#8482; and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation&#8217;s EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state&#8217;s laws.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+The Foundation&#8217;s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
+Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
+to date contact information can be found at the Foundation&#8217;s website
+and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
+public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
+visit <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/donate/">www.gutenberg.org/donate</a>.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg&#8482; eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
+facility: <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This website includes information about Project Gutenberg&#8482;,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8ddf525
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #9228 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9228)
diff --git a/old/9228.txt b/old/9228.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..aebd896
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/9228.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1143 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Christmas Banquet (From "Mosses From An
+Old Manse"), by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Christmas Banquet (From "Mosses From An Old Manse")
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Posting Date: December 8, 2010 [EBook #9228]
+Release Date: November, 2005
+First Posted: September 6, 2003
+[Last Updated: September 28, 2020]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                     MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE
+
+                      By Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+                      THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET
+
+
+        [FROM THE UNPUBLISHED "_ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART_."]
+
+
+"I have here attempted," said Roderick, unfolding a few sheets of
+manuscript, as he sat with Rosina and the sculptor in the
+summer-house,--"I have attempted to seize hold of a personage who
+glides past me, occasionally, in my walk through life.  My former sad
+experience, as you know, has gifted me with some degree of insight
+into the gloomy mysteries of the human heart, through which I have
+wandered like one astray in a dark cavern, with his torch fast
+flickering to extinction.  But this man, this class of men, is a
+hopeless puzzle."
+
+"Well, but propound him," said the sculptor.  "Let us have an idea
+of hint, to begin with."
+
+"Why, indeed," replied Roderick, "he is such a being as I could
+conceive you to carve out of marble, and some yet unrealized
+perfection of human science to endow with an exquisite mockery of
+intellect; but still there lacks the last inestimable touch of a
+divine Creator.  He looks like a man; and, perchance, like a better
+specimen of man than you ordinarily meet.  You might esteem him
+wise; he is capable of cultivation and refinement, and has at least
+an external conscience; but the demands that spirit makes upon
+spirit are precisely those to which he cannot respond. When at last
+you come close to him you find him chill and unsubstantial,--a mere
+vapor."
+
+"I believe," said Rosina, "I have a glimmering idea of what you
+mean."
+
+"Then be thankful," answered her husband, smiling; "but do not
+anticipate any further illumination from what I am about to read. I
+have here imagined such a man to be--what, probably, he never
+is--conscious of the deficiency in his spiritual organization. Methinks
+the result would be a sense of cold unreality wherewith he would go
+shivering through the world, longing to exchange his load of ice for
+any burden of real grief that fate could fling upon a human being."
+
+Contenting himself with this preface, Roderick began to read.
+
+In a certain old gentleman's last will and testament there appeared
+a bequest, which, as his final thought and deed, was singularly in
+keeping with a long life of melancholy eccentricity.  He devised a
+considerable sum for establishing a fund, the interest of which was
+to be expended, annually forever, in preparing a Christmas Banquet
+for ten of the most miserable persons that could be found.  It
+seemed not to be the testator's purpose to make these half a score
+of sad hearts merry, but to provide that the stern or fierce
+expression of human discontent should not be drowned, even for that
+one holy and joyful day, amid the acclamations of festal gratitude
+which all Christendom sends up.  And he desired, likewise, to
+perpetuate his own remonstrance against the earthly course of
+Providence, and his sad and sour dissent from those systems of
+religion or philosophy which either find sunshine in the world or
+draw it down from heaven.
+
+The task of inviting the guests, or of selecting among such as might
+advance their claims to partake of this dismal hospitality, was
+confided to the two trustees or stewards of the fund.  These
+gentlemen, like their deceased friend, were sombre humorists, who
+made it their principal occupation to number the sable threads in
+the web of human life, and drop all the golden ones out of the
+reckoning.  They performed their present office with integrity and
+judgment.  The aspect of the assembled company, on the day of the
+first festival, might not, it is true, have satisfied every beholder
+that these were especially the individuals, chosen forth from all
+the world, whose griefs were worthy to stand as indicators of the
+mass of human suffering.  Yet, after due consideration, it could not
+be disputed that here was a variety of hopeless discomfort, which,
+if it sometimes arose from causes apparently inadequate, was thereby
+only the shrewder imputation against the nature and mechanism of
+life.
+
+The arrangements and decorations of the banquet were probably
+intended to signify that death in life which had been the testator's
+definition of existence.  The hall, illuminated by torches, was hung
+round with curtains of deep and dusky purple, and adorned with
+branches of cypress and wreaths of artificial flowers, imitative of
+such as used to be strewn over the dead.  A sprig of parsley was
+laid by every plate.  The main reservoir of wine, was a sepulchral
+urn of silver, whence the liquor was distributed around the table in
+small vases, accurately copied from those that held the tears of
+ancient mourners.  Neither had the stewards--if it were their taste
+that arranged these details--forgotten the fantasy of the old
+Egyptians, who seated a skeleton at every festive board, and mocked
+their own merriment with the imperturbable grin of a death's-head.
+Such a fearful guest, shrouded in a black mantle, sat now at the
+head of the table.  It was whispered, I know not with what truth,
+that the testator himself had once walked the visible world with the
+machinery of that sane skeleton, and that it was one of the
+stipulations of his will, that he should thus be permitted to sit,
+from year to year, at the banquet which he had instituted. If so, it
+was perhaps covertly implied that he had cherished no hopes of bliss
+beyond the grave to compensate for the evils which he felt or
+imagined here.  And if, in their bewildered conjectures as to the
+purpose of earthly existence, the banqueters should throw aside the
+veil, and cast an inquiring glance at this figure of death, as
+seeking thence the solution otherwise unattainable, the only reply
+would be a stare of the vacant eye-caverns and a grin of the
+skeleton jaws.  Such was the response that the dead man had fancied
+himself to receive when he asked of Death to solve the riddle of his
+life; and it was his desire to repeat it when the guests of his
+dismal hospitality should find themselves perplexed with the same
+question.
+
+"What means that wreath?"  asked several of the company, while
+viewing the decorations of the table.
+
+They alluded to a wreath of cypress, which was held on high by a
+skeleton arm, protruding from within the black mantle.
+
+"It is a crown," said one of the stewards, "not for the worthiest,
+but for the wofulest, when he shall prove his claim to it."
+
+The guest earliest bidden to the festival was a man of soft and
+gentle character, who had not energy to struggle against the heavy
+despondency to which his temperament rendered him liable; and
+therefore with nothing outwardly to excuse him from happiness, he
+had spent a life of quiet misery that made his blood torpid, and
+weighed upon his breath, and sat like a ponderous night-fiend upon
+every throb of his unresisting heart. His wretchedness seemed as
+deep as his original nature, if not identical with it.  It was the
+misfortune of a second guest to cherish within his bosom a diseased
+heart, which had become so wretchedly sore that the continual and
+unavoidable rubs of the world, the blow of an enemy, the careless
+jostle of a stranger, and even the faithful and loving touch of a
+friend, alike made ulcers in it.  As is the habit of people thus
+afflicted, he found his chief employment in exhibiting these
+miserable sores to any who would give themselves the pain of viewing
+them.  A third guest was a hypochondriac, whose imagination wrought
+necromancy in his outward and inward world, and caused him to see
+monstrous faces in the household fire, and dragons in the clouds of
+sunset, and fiends in the guise of beautiful women, and something
+ugly or wicked beneath all the pleasant surfaces of nature.  His
+neighbor at table was one who, in his early youth, had trusted
+mankind too much, and hoped too highly in their behalf, and, in
+meeting with many disappointments, had become desperately soured.
+For several years back this misanthrope bad employed himself in
+accumulating motives for hating and despising his race,--such as
+murder, lust, treachery, ingratitude, faithlessness of trusted
+friends, instinctive vices of children, impurity of women, hidden
+guilt in men of saint-like aspect,--and, in short, all manner of
+black realities that sought to decorate themselves with outward
+grace or glory.  But at every atrocious fact that was added to his
+catalogue, at every increase of the sad knowledge which he spent his
+life to collect, the native impulses of the poor man's loving and
+confiding heart made him groan with anguish.  Next, with his heavy
+brow bent downward, there stole into the hall a man naturally
+earnest and impassioned, who, from his immemorial infancy, had felt
+the consciousness of a high message to the world; but, essaying to
+deliver it, had found either no voice or form of speech, or else no
+ears to listen.  Therefore his whole life was a bitter questioning
+of himself: "Why have not men acknowledged my mission?  Am I not a
+self-deluding fool?  What business have I on earth?  Where is my
+grave?"  Throughout the festival, he quaffed frequent draughts from
+the sepulchral urn of wine, hoping thus to quench the celestial fire
+that tortured his own breast and could not benefit his race.
+
+Then there entered, having flung away a ticket for a ball, a gay
+gallant of yesterday, who had found four or five wrinkles in his
+brow, and more gray hairs than he could well number on his head.
+Endowed with sense and feeling, he had nevertheless spent his youth
+in folly, but had reached at last that dreary point in life where
+Folly quits us of her own accord, leaving us to make friends with
+Wisdom if we can.  Thus, cold and desolate, he had come to seek
+Wisdom at the banquet, and wondered if the skeleton were she.  To
+eke out the company, the stewards had invited a distressed poet from
+his home in the almshouse, and a melancholy idiot from the
+street-corner.  The latter had just the glimmering of sense that was
+sufficient to make him conscious of a vacancy, which the poor
+fellow, all his life long, had mistily sought to fill up with
+intelligence, wandering up and down the streets, and groaning
+miserably because his attempts were ineffectual.  The only lady in
+the hall was one who had fallen short of absolute and perfect
+beauty, merely by the trifling defect of a slight cast in her left
+eye.  But this blemish, minute as it was, so shocked the pure ideal
+of her soul, rather than her vanity, that she passed her life in
+solitude, and veiled her countenance even from her own gaze.  So the
+skeleton sat shrouded at one end of the table, and this poor lady at
+the other.
+
+One other guest remains to be described.  He was a young man of
+smooth brow, fair cheek, and fashionable mien.  So far as his
+exterior developed him, he might much more suitably have found a
+place at some merry Christmas table, than have been numbered among
+the blighted, fate-stricken, fancy-tortured set of ill-starred
+banqueters.  Murmurs arose among the guests as they noted, the
+glance of general scrutiny which the intruder threw over his
+companions.  What had he to do among them?  Why did not the skeleton
+of the dead founder of the feast unbend its rattling joints, arise,
+and motion the unwelcome stranger from the board?
+
+"Shameful!" said the morbid man, while a new ulcer broke out in his
+heart.  "He comes to mock us! we shall be the jest of his tavern
+friends I--he will make a farce of our miseries, and bring it out
+upon the stage!"
+
+"O, never mind him!" said the hypochondriac, smiling sourly.  "He
+shall feast from yonder tureen of viper-soup; and if there is a
+fricassee of scorpions on the table, pray let him have his share of
+it.  For the dessert, he shall taste the apples of Sodom, then, if
+he like our Christmas fare, let him return again next year!"
+
+"Trouble him not," murmured the melancholy man, with gentleness.
+"What matters it whether the consciousness of misery come a few
+years sooner or later?  If this youth deem himself happy now, yet
+let him sit with us for the sake of the wretchedness to come."
+
+The poor idiot approached the young man with that mournful aspect of
+vacant inquiry which his face continually wore, and which caused
+people to say that he was always in search of his missing wits.
+After no little examination he touched the stranger's hand, but
+immediately drew back his own, shaking his head and shivering.
+
+"Cold, cold, cold!" muttered the idiot.
+
+The young man shivered too, and smiled.
+
+"Gentlemen, and you, madam," said one of the stewards of the
+festival, "do not conceive so ill either of our caution or judgment,
+as to imagine that we have admitted this young stranger--Gervayse
+Hastings by name--without a full investigation and thoughtful
+balance of his claims.  Trust me, not a guest at the table is better
+entitled to his seat."
+
+The steward's guaranty was perforce satisfactory.  The company,
+therefore, took their places, and addressed themselves to the
+serious business of the feast, but were soon disturbed by the
+hypochondriac, who thrust back his chair, complaining that a dish of
+stewed toads and vipers was set before him, and that there was green
+ditchwater in his cup of wine.  This mistake being amended, he
+quietly resumed his seat.  The wine, as it flowed freely from the
+sepulchral urn, seemed to come imbued with all gloomy inspirations;
+so that its influence was not to cheer, but either to sink the
+revellers into a deeper melancholy, or elevate their spirits to an
+enthusiasm of wretchedness.  The conversation was various.  They
+told sad stories about people who might have been Worthy guests at
+such a festival as the present.  They talked of grisly incidents in
+human history; of strange crimes, which, if truly considered, were
+but convulsions of agony; of some lives that had been altogether
+wretched, and of others, which, wearing a general semblance of
+happiness, had yet been deformed, sooner or later, by misfortune, as
+by the intrusion of a grim face at a banquet; of death-bed scenes,
+and what dark intimations might be gathered from the words of dying
+men; of suicide, and whether the more eligible mode were by halter,
+knife, poison, drowning, gradual starvation, or the fumes of
+charcoal.  The majority of the guests, as is the custom with people
+thoroughly and profoundly sick at heart, were anxious to make their
+own woes the theme of discussion, and prove themselves most
+excellent in anguish.  The misanthropist went deep into the
+philosophy of evil, and wandered about in the darkness, with now and
+then a gleam of discolored light hovering on ghastly shapes and
+horrid scenery.  Many a miserable thought, such as men have stumbled
+upon from age to age, did he now rake up again, and gloat over it as
+an inestimable gem, a diamond, a treasure far preferable to those
+bright, spiritual revelations of a better world, which are like
+precious stones from heaven's pavement.  And then, amid his lore of
+wretchedness he hid his face and wept.
+
+It was a festival at which the woful man of Uz might suitably have
+been a guest, together with all, in each succeeding age, who have
+tasted deepest of the bitterness of life.  And be it said, too, that
+every son or daughter of woman, however favored with happy fortune,
+might, at one sad moment or another, have claimed the privilege of a
+stricken heart, to sit down at this table. But, throughout the
+feast, it was remarked that the young stranger, Gervayse Hastings,
+was unsuccessful in his attempts to catch its pervading spirit.  At
+any deep, strong thought that found utterance, and which was torn
+out, as it were, from the saddest recesses of human consciousness,
+he looked mystified and bewildered; even more than the poor idiot,
+who seemed to grasp at such things with his earnest heart, and thus
+occasionally to comprehend them.  The young man's conversation was
+of a colder and lighter kind, often brilliant, but lacking the
+powerful characteristics of a nature that had been developed by
+suffering.
+
+"Sir," said the misanthropist, bluntly, in reply to some observation
+by Gervayse Hastings, "pray do not address me again. We have no
+right to talk together.  Our minds have nothing in common.  By what
+claim you appear at this banquet I cannot guess; but methinks, to a
+man who could say what you have just now said, my companions and
+myself must seem no more than shadows flickering on the wall.  And
+precisely such a shadow are you to us."
+
+The young man smiled and bowed, but, drawing himself back in his
+chair, he buttoned his coat over his breast, as if the banqueting-ball
+were growing chill.  Again the idiot fixed his melancholy stare
+upon the youth, and murmured, "Cold! cold! cold!"
+
+The banquet drew to its conclusion, and the guests departed.
+Scarcely had they stepped across the threshold of the hall, when the
+scene that had there passed seemed like the vision of a sick fancy,
+or an exhalation from a stagnant heart.  Now and then, however,
+during the year that ensued, these melancholy people caught glimpses
+of one another, transient, indeed, but enough to prove that they
+walked the earth with the ordinary allotment of reality.  Sometimes
+a pair of them came face to face, while stealing through the evening
+twilight, enveloped in their sable cloaks.  Sometimes they casually
+met in churchyards.  Once, also, it happened that two of the dismal
+banqueters mutually started at recognizing each other in the noonday
+sunshine of a crowded street, stalking there like ghosts astray.
+Doubtless they wondered why the skeleton did not come abroad at
+noonday too.
+
+But whenever the necessity of their affairs compelled these
+Christmas guests into the bustling world, they were sure to
+encounter the young man who had so unaccountably been admitted to
+the festival.  They saw him among the gay and fortunate; they caught
+the sunny sparkle of his eye; they heard the light and careless
+tones of his voice, and muttered to themselves with such indignation
+as only the aristocracy of wretchedness could kindle, "The traitor!
+The vile impostor!  Providence, in its own good time, may give him a
+right to feast among us!"  But the young man's unabashed eye dwelt
+upon their gloomy figures as they passed him, seeming to say,
+perchance with somewhat of a sneer, "First, know my secret then,
+measure your claims with mine!"
+
+The step of Time stole onward, and soon brought merry Christmas
+round again, with glad and solemn worship in the churches, and
+sports, games, festivals, and everywhere the bright face of Joy
+beside the household fire.  Again likewise the hall, with its
+curtains of dusky purple, was illuminated by the death-torches
+gleaming on the sepulchral decorations of the banquet.  The veiled,
+skeleton sat in state, lifting the cypress-wreath above its head, as
+the guerdon of some guest illustrious in the qualifications which
+there claimed precedence.  As the stewards deemed the world
+inexhaustible in misery, and were desirous of recognizing it in all
+its forms, they had not seen fit to reassemble the company of the
+former year.  New faces now threw their gloom across the table.
+
+There was a man of nice conscience, who bore a blood-stain in his
+heart--the death of a fellow-creature--which, for his more
+exquisite torture, had chanced with such a peculiarity of
+circumstances, that he could not absolutely determine whether his
+will had entered into the deed or not.  Therefore, his whole life
+was spent in the agony of an inward trial for murder, with a
+continual sifting of the details of his terrible calamity, until his
+mind had no longer any thought, nor his soul any emotion,
+disconnected with it, There was a mother, too,--a mother once, but a
+desolation now,--who, many years before, had gone out on a
+pleasure-party, and, returning, found her infant smothered in its
+little bed. And ever since she has been tortured with the fantasy that
+her buried baby lay smothering in its coffin.  Then there was an aged
+lady, who had lived from time immemorial with a constant tremor
+quivering through her-frame.  It was terrible to discern her dark
+shadow tremulous upon the wall; her lips, likewise, were tremulous;
+and the expression of her eye seemed to indicate that her soul was
+trembling too.  Owing to the bewilderment and confusion which made
+almost a chaos of her intellect, it was impossible to discover what
+dire misfortune had thus shaken her nature to its depths; so that
+the stewards had admitted her to the table, not from any
+acquaintance with her history, but on the safe testimony of her
+miserable aspect.  Some surprise was expressed at the presence of a
+bluff, red-faced gentleman, a certain Mr. Smith, who had evidently
+the fat of many a rich feast within him, and the habitual twinkle of
+whose eye betrayed a disposition to break forth into uproarious
+laughter for little cause or none.  It turned out, however, that,
+with the best possible flow of spirits, our poor friend was
+afflicted with a physical disease of the heart, which threatened
+instant death on the slightest cachinnatory indulgence, or even that
+titillation of the bodily frame produced by merry thoughts.  In this
+dilemma he had sought admittance to the banquet, on the ostensible
+plea of his irksome and miserable state, but, in reality, with the
+hope of imbibing a life-preserving melancholy.
+
+A married couple had been invited from a motive of bitter humor, it
+being well understood that they rendered each other unutterably
+miserable whenever they chanced to meet, and therefore must
+necessarily be fit associates at the festival.  In contrast with
+these was another couple still unmarried, who had interchanged their
+hearts in early life, but had been divided by circumstances as
+impalpable as morning mist, and kept apart so long that their
+spirits now found it impossible to meet, Therefore, yearning for
+communion, yet shrinking from one another and choosing none beside,
+they felt themselves companionless in life, and looked upon eternity
+as a boundless desert.  Next to the skeleton sat a mere son of
+earth,--a hunter of the Exchange,--a gatherer of shining dust,--a
+man whose life's record was in his ledger, and whose soul's
+prison-house the vaults of the bank where he kept his deposits.  This
+person had been greatly perplexed at his invitation, deeming himself
+one of the most fortunate men in the city; but the stewards
+persisted in demanding his presence, assuring him that he had no
+conception how miserable he was.
+
+And now appeared a figure which we must acknowledge as our
+acquaintance of the former festival.  It was Gervayse Hastings,
+whose presence had then caused so much question and criticism, and
+who now took his place with the composure of one whose claims were
+satisfactory to himself and must needs be allowed by others. Yet his
+easy and unruffled face betrayed no sorrow.
+
+The well-skilled beholders gazed a moment into his eyes and shook
+their heads, to miss the unuttered sympathy--the countersign never
+to be falsified--of those whose hearts are cavern-mouths through
+which they descend into a region of illimitable woe and recognize
+other wanderers there.
+
+"Who is this youth?" asked the man with a bloodstain on his
+conscience.  "Surely he has never gone down into the depths!  I know
+all the aspects of those who have passed through the dark valley.
+By what right is he among us?"
+
+"Ah, it is a sinful thing to come hither without a sorrow," murmured
+the aged lady, in accents that partook of the eternal tremor which
+pervaded her whole being "Depart, young man!  Your soul has never
+been shaken, and, therefore, I tremble so much the more to look at
+you."
+
+"His soul shaken!  No; I'll answer for it," said bluff Mr. Smith,
+pressing his hand upon his heart and making himself as melancholy as
+he could, for fear of a fatal explosion of laughter.  "I know the
+lad well; he has as fair prospects as any young man about town, and
+has no more right among us miserable creatures than the child
+unborn.  He never was miserable and probably never will be!"
+
+"Our honored guests," interposed the stewards, "pray have patience
+with us, and believe, at least, that our deep veneration for the
+sacredness of this solemnity would preclude any wilful violation of
+it.  Receive this young man to your table.  It may not be too much
+to say, that no guest here would exchange his own heart for the one
+that beats within that youthful bosom!"
+
+"I'd call it a bargain, and gladly, too," muttered Mr. Smith, with a
+perplexing mixture of sadness and mirthful conceit.  "A plague upon
+their nonsense!  My own heart is the only really miserable one in
+the company; it will certainly be the death of me at last!"
+
+Nevertheless, as on the former occasion, the judgment of the
+stewards being without appeal, the company sat down.  The obnoxious
+guest made no more attempt to obtrude his conversation on those
+about him, but appeared to listen to the table-talk with peculiar
+assiduity, as if some inestimable secret, otherwise beyond his
+reach, might be conveyed in a casual word.  And in truth, to those
+who could understand and value it, there was rich matter in the
+upgushings and outpourings of these initiated souls to whom sorrow
+had been a talisman, admitting them into spiritual depths which no
+other spell can open.  Sometimes out of the midst of densest gloom
+there flashed a momentary radiance, pure as crystal, bright as the
+flame of stars, and shedding such a glow upon the mysteries of life,
+that the guests were ready to exclaim, "Surely the riddle is on the
+point of being solved!"  At such illuminated intervals the saddest
+mourners felt it to be revealed that mortal griefs are but shadowy
+and external; no more than the sable robes voluminously shrouding a
+certain divine reality, and thus indicating what might otherwise be
+altogether invisible to mortal eye.
+
+"Just now," remarked the trembling old woman, "I seemed to see
+beyond the outside.  And then my everlasting tremor passed away!"
+
+"Would that I could dwell always in these momentary gleams of
+light!" said the man of stricken conscience.  "Then the blood-stain
+in my heart would be washed clean away."
+
+This strain of conversation appeared so unintelligibly absurd to
+good Mr. Smith, that he burst into precisely the fit of laughter
+which his physicians had warned him against, as likely to prove
+instantaneously fatal.  In effect, he fell back in his chair a
+corpse, with a broad grin upon his face, while his ghost, perchance,
+remained beside it bewildered at its unpremeditated exit.  This
+catastrophe of course broke up the festival.
+
+"How is this?  You do not tremble!" observed the tremulous old woman
+to Gervayse Hastings, who was gazing at the dead man with singular
+intentness.  "Is it not awful to see him so suddenly vanish out of
+the midst of life,--this man of flesh and blood, whose earthly
+nature was so warm and strong?  There is a never-ending tremor in my
+soul, but it trembles afresh at, this!  And you are calm!"
+
+"Would that he could teach me somewhat!" said Gervayse Hastings,
+drawing a long breath.  "Men pass before me like shadows on the
+wall; their actions, passions, feelings, are flickerings of the
+light, and then they vanish!  Neither the corpse, nor yonder
+skeleton, nor this old woman's everlasting tremor, can give me what
+I seek."
+
+And then the company departed.
+
+We cannot linger to narrate, in such detail, more circumstances of
+these singular festivals, which, in accordance with the founder's
+will, continued to be kept with the regularity of an established
+institution.  In process of time the stewards adopted the custom of
+inviting, from far and near, those individuals whose misfortunes
+were prominent above other men's, and whose mental and moral
+development might, therefore, be supposed to possess a corresponding
+interest.  The exiled noble of the French Revolution, and the broken
+soldier of the Empire, were alike represented at the table.  Fallen
+monarchs, wandering about the earth, have found places at that
+forlorn and miserable feast. The statesman, when his party flung him
+off, might, if he chose it, be once more a great man for the space
+of a single banquet. Aaron Burr's name appears on the record at a
+period when his ruin--the profoundest and most striking, with more
+of moral circumstance in it than that of almost any other man--was
+complete in his lonely age.  Stephen Guard, when his wealth weighed
+upon him like a mountain, once sought admittance of his own accord.
+It is not probable, however, that these men had any lesson to teach
+in the lore of discontent and misery which might not equally well
+have been studied in the common walks of life. Illustrious
+unfortunates attract a wider sympathy, not because their griefs are
+more intense, but because, being set on lofty pedestals, they the
+better serve mankind as instances and bywords of calamity.
+
+It concerns our present purpose to say that, at each successive
+festival, Gervayse Hastings showed his face, gradually changing from
+the smooth beauty of his youth to the thoughtful comeliness of
+manhood, and thence to the bald, impressive dignity of age. He was
+the only individual invariably present.  Yet on every occasion there
+were murmurs, both from those who knew his character and position,
+and from them whose hearts shrank back as denying his companionship
+in their mystic fraternity.
+
+"Who is this impassive man?" had been asked a hundred times. "Has he
+suffered?  Has he sinned?  There are no traces of either. Then
+wherefore is he here?"
+
+"You must inquire of the stewards or of himself," was the constant
+reply.  "We seem to know him well here in our city, and know
+nothing of him but what is creditable and fortunate.  Yet hither he
+comes, year after year, to this gloomy banquet, and sits among the
+guests like a marble statue.  Ask yonder skeleton, perhaps that may
+solve the riddle!"
+
+It was in truth a wonder.  The life of Gervayse Hastings was not
+merely a prosperous, but a brilliant one.  Everything had gone well
+with him.  He was wealthy, far beyond the expenditure that was
+required by habits of magnificence, a taste of rare purity and
+cultivation, a love of travel, a scholar's instinct to collect a
+splendid library, and, moreover, what seemed a magnificent
+liberality to the distressed.  He had sought happiness, and not
+vainly, if a lovely and tender wife, and children of fair promise,
+could insure it.  He had, besides, ascended above the limit which
+separates the obscure from the distinguished, and had won a
+stainless reputation in affairs of the widest public importance.
+Not that he was a popular character, or had within him the
+mysterious attributes which are essential to that species of
+success.  To the public he was a cold abstraction, wholly destitute
+of those rich lines of personality, that living warmth, and the
+peculiar faculty of stamping his own heart's impression on a
+multitude of hearts, by which the people recognize their favorites.
+And it must be owned that, after his most intimate associates had
+done their best to know him thoroughly, and love him warmly, they
+were startled to find how little hold he had upon their affections.
+They approved, they admired, but still in those moments when the
+human spirit most craves reality, they shrank back from Gervayse
+Hastings, as powerless to give them what they sought.  It was the
+feeling of distrustful regret with which we should draw back the
+hand after extending it, in an illusive twilight, to grasp the hand
+of a shadow upon the wall.
+
+As the superficial fervency of youth decayed, this peculiar effect
+of Gervayse Hastings's character grew more perceptible. His
+children, when he extended his arms, came coldly to his knees, but
+never climbed them of their own accord.  His wife wept secretly, and
+almost adjudged herself a criminal because she shivered in the chill
+of his bosom.  He, too, occasionally appeared not unconscious of the
+chillness of his moral atmosphere, and willing, if it might be so,
+to warm himself at a kindly fire.  But age stole onward and benumbed
+him snore and more.  As the hoar-frost began to gather on him his
+wife went to her grave, and was doubtless warmer there; his children
+either died or were scattered to different homes of their own; and
+old Gervayse Hastings, unscathed by grief,--alone, but needing no
+companionship,--continued his steady walk through life, and still
+one very Christmas day attended at the dismal banquet.  His
+privilege as a guest had become prescriptive now.  Had he claimed
+the head of the table, even the skeleton would have been ejected
+from its seat.
+
+Finally, at the merry Christmas-tide, when he had numbered fourscore
+years complete, this pale, highbrowed, marble-featured old man once
+more entered the long-frequented hall, with the same impassive
+aspect that had called forth so much dissatisfied remark at his
+first attendance.  Time, except in matters merely external, had done
+nothing for him, either of good or evil.  As he took his place he
+threw a calm, inquiring glance around the table, as if to ascertain
+whether any guest had yet appeared, after so many unsuccessful
+banquets, who might impart to him the mystery--the deep, warm
+secret--the life within the life--which, whether manifested in joy
+or sorrow, is what gives substance to a world of shadows.
+
+"My friends," said Gervayse Hastings, assuming a position which his
+long conversance with the festival caused to appear natural, "you
+are welcome!  I drink to you all in this cup of sepulchral wine."
+
+The guests replied courteously, but still in a manner that proved
+them unable to receive the old man as a member of their sad
+fraternity.  It may be well to give the reader an idea of the
+present company at the banquet.
+
+One was formerly a clergyman, enthusiastic in his profession, and
+apparently of the genuine dynasty of those old Puritan divines whose
+faith in their calling, and stern exercise of it, had placed them
+among the mighty of the earth.  But yielding to the speculative
+tendency of the age, he had gone astray from the firm foundation of
+an ancient faith, and wandered into a cloud-region, where everything
+was misty and deceptive, ever mocking him with a semblance of
+reality, but still dissolving when he flung himself upon it for
+support and rest.  His instinct and early training demanded
+something steadfast; but, looking forward, he beheld vapors piled on
+vapors, and behind him an impassable gulf between the man of
+yesterday and to-day, on the borders of which he paced to and fro,
+sometimes wringing his hands in agony, and often making his own woe
+a theme of scornful merriment.  This surely was a miserable man.
+Next, there was a theorist,--one of a numerous tribe, although he
+deemed himself unique since the creation,--a theorist, who had
+conceived a plan by which all the wretchedness of earth, moral and
+physical, might be done away, and the bliss of the millennium at
+once accomplished.  But, the incredulity of mankind debarring him
+from action, he was smitten with as much grief as if the whole mass
+of woe which he was denied the opportunity to remedy were crowded
+into his own bosom. A plain old man in black attracted much of the
+company's notice, on the supposition that he was no other than
+Father Miller, who, it seemed, had given himself up to despair at
+the tedious delay of the final conflagration.  Then there was a man
+distinguished for native pride and obstinacy, who, a little while
+before, had possessed immense wealth, and held the control of a vast
+moneyed interest which he had wielded in the same spirit as a
+despotic monarch would wield the power of his empire, carrying on a
+tremendous moral warfare, the roar and tremor of which was felt at
+every fireside in the land.  At length came a crushing ruin,--a
+total overthrow of fortune, power, and character,--the effect of
+which on his imperious and, in many respects, noble and lofty nature
+might have entitled him to a place, not merely at our festival, but
+among the peers of Pandemonium.
+
+There was a modern philanthropist, who had become so deeply sensible
+of the calamities of thousands and millions of his fellow-creatures,
+and of the impracticableness of any general measures for their
+relief, that he had no heart to do what little good lay immediately
+within his power, but contented himself with being miserable for
+sympathy.  Near him sat a gentleman in a predicament hitherto
+unprecedented, but of which the present epoch probably affords
+numerous examples.  Ever since he was of capacity to read a
+newspaper, this person had prided himself on his consistent
+adherence to one political party, but, in the confusion of these
+latter days, had got bewildered and knew not whereabouts his party
+was.  This wretched condition, so morally desolate and disheartening
+to a man who has long accustomed himself to merge his individuality
+in the mass of a great body, can only be conceived by such as have
+experienced it.  His next companion was a popular orator who had
+lost his voice, and--as it was pretty much all that he had to
+lose--had fallen into a state of hopeless melancholy.  The table was
+likewise graced by two of the gentler sex,--one, a half-starved,
+consumptive seamstress, the representative of thousands just as
+wretched; the other, a woman of unemployed energy, who found herself
+in the world with nothing to achieve, nothing to enjoy, and nothing
+even to suffer. She had, therefore, driven herself to the verge of
+madness by dark broodings over the wrongs of her sex, and its
+exclusion from a proper field of action.  The roll of guests being
+thus complete, a side-table had been set for three or four
+disappointed office-seekers, with hearts as sick as death, whom the
+stewards had admitted partly because their calamities really
+entitled them to entrance here, and partly that they were in
+especial need of a good dinner.  There was likewise a homeless dog,
+with his tail between his legs, licking up the crumbs and gnawing
+the fragments of the feast,--such a melancholy cur as one sometimes
+sees about the streets without a master, and willing to follow the
+first that will accept his service.
+
+In their own way, these were as wretched a set of people as ever had
+assembled at the festival.  There they sat, with the veiled skeleton
+of the founder holding aloft the cypress-wreath, at one end of the
+table, and at the other, wrapped in furs, the withered figure of
+Gervayse Hastings, stately, calm, and cold, impressing the company
+with awe, yet so little interesting their sympathy that he might
+have vanished into thin air without their once exclaiming, "Whither
+is he gone?"
+
+"Sir," said the philanthropist, addressing the old man, "you have
+been so long a guest at this annual festival, and have thus been
+conversant with so many varieties of human affliction, that, not
+improbably, you have thence derived some great and important
+lessons.  How blessed were your lot could you reveal a secret by
+which all this mass of woe might be removed!"
+
+"I know of but one misfortune," answered Gervayse Hastings, quietly,
+"and that is my own."
+
+"Your own!" rejoined the philanthropist.  "And looking back on your
+serene and prosperous life, how can you claim to be the sole
+unfortunate of the human race?"
+
+"You will not understand it," replied Gervayse Hastings, feebly, and
+with a singular inefficiency of pronunciation, and sometimes putting
+one word for another.  "None have understood it, not even those who
+experience the like.  It is a chillness, a want of earnestness, a
+feeling as if what should be my heart were a thing of vapor, a
+haunting perception of unreality!  Thus seeming to possess all that
+other men have, all that men aim at, I have really possessed
+nothing, neither joy nor griefs.  All things, all persons,--as was
+truly said to me at this table long and long ago,--have been like
+shadows flickering on the wall.  It was so with my wife and
+children, with those who seemed my friends: it is so with
+yourselves, whom I see now before one.  Neither have I myself any
+real existence, but am a shadow like the rest."
+
+"And how is it with your views of a future life?" inquired the
+speculative clergyman.
+
+"Worse than with you," said the old man, in a hollow and feeble
+tone; "for I cannot conceive it earnestly enough to feel either hope
+or fear.  Mine,--mine is the wretchedness!  This cold heart,--this
+unreal life!  Ah! it grows colder still."
+
+It so chanced that at this juncture the decayed ligaments of the
+skeleton gave way, and the dry hones fell together in a heap, thus
+causing the dusty wreath of cypress to drop upon the table. The
+attention of the company being thus diverted for a single instant
+from Gervayse Hastings, they perceived, on turning again towards
+him, that the old man had undergone a change.  His shadow had ceased
+to flicker on the wall.
+
+
+"Well, Rosina, what is your criticism?" asked Roderick, as he rolled
+up the manuscript.
+
+"Frankly, your success is by no means complete," replied she. "It is
+true, I have an idea of the character you endeavor to describe; but
+it is rather by dint of my own thought than your expression."
+
+"That is unavoidable," observed the sculptor, "because the
+characteristics are all negative.  If Gervayse Hastings could have
+imbibed one human grief at the gloomy banquet, the task of
+describing him would have been infinitely easier.  Of such
+persons--and we do meet with these moral monsters now and then--it is
+difficult to conceive how they came to exist here, or what there is
+in them capable of existence hereafter.  They seem to be on the
+outside of everything; and nothing wearies the soul more than an
+attempt to comprehend them within its grasp."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Christmas Banquet (From "Mosses
+From An Old Manse"), by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET ***
+
+***** This file should be named 9228.txt or 9228.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/9/2/2/9228/
+
+Produced by David Widger.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/9228.zip b/old/9228.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..84c89cb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/9228.zip
diff --git a/old/haw5510.txt b/old/haw5510.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4399b7d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/haw5510.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1115 @@
+Project Gutenberg EBook, The Christmas Banquet, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+From "Mosses From An Old Manse"
+#55 in our series by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**EBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+
+Title: The Christmas Banquet (From "Mosses From An Old Manse")
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: Nov, 2005  [EBook #9228]
+[This file was first posted on September 6, 2003]
+[Last updated on February 6, 2007]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+                     MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE
+
+                      By Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+                      THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET
+
+
+        [FROM THE UNPUBLISHED "_ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART_."]
+
+
+"I have here attempted," said Roderick, unfolding a few sheets of
+manuscript, as he sat with Rosina and the sculptor in the summer-
+house,--"I have attempted to seize hold of a personage who glides
+past me, occasionally, in my walk through life.  My former sad
+experience, as you know, has gifted me with some degree of insight
+into the gloomy mysteries of the human heart, through which I have
+wandered like one astray in a dark cavern, with his torch fast
+flickering to extinction.  But this man, this class of men, is a
+hopeless puzzle."
+
+"Well, but propound him," said the sculptor.  "Let us have an idea
+of hint, to begin with."
+
+"Why, indeed," replied Roderick, "he is such a being as I could
+conceive you to carve out of marble, and some yet unrealized
+perfection of human science to endow with an exquisite mockery of
+intellect; but still there lacks the last inestimable touch of a
+divine Creator.  He looks like a man; and, perchance, like a better
+specimen of man than you ordinarily meet.  You might esteem him
+wise; he is capable of cultivation and refinement, and has at least
+an external conscience; but the demands that spirit makes upon
+spirit are precisely those to which he cannot respond. When at last
+you come close to him you find him chill and unsubstantial,--a mere
+vapor."
+
+"I believe," said Rosina, "I have a glimmering idea of what you
+mean."
+
+"Then be thankful," answered her husband, smiling; "but do not
+anticipate any further illumination from what I am about to read. I
+have here imagined such a man to be--what, probably, he never is--
+conscious of the deficiency in his spiritual organization. Methinks
+the result would be a sense of cold unreality wherewith he would go
+shivering through the world, longing to exchange his load of ice for
+any burden of real grief that fate could fling upon a human being."
+
+Contenting himself with this preface, Roderick began to read.
+
+In a certain old gentleman's last will and testament there appeared
+a bequest, which, as his final thought and deed, was singularly in
+keeping with a long life of melancholy eccentricity.  He devised a
+considerable sum for establishing a fund, the interest of which was
+to be expended, annually forever, in preparing a Christmas Banquet
+for ten of the most miserable persons that could be found.  It
+seemed not to be the testator's purpose to make these half a score
+of sad hearts merry, but to provide that the stern or fierce
+expression of human discontent should not be drowned, even for that
+one holy and joyful day, amid the acclamations of festal gratitude
+which all Christendom sends up.  And he desired, likewise, to
+perpetuate his own remonstrance against the earthly course of
+Providence, and his sad and sour dissent from those systems of
+religion or philosophy which either find sunshine in the world or
+draw it down from heaven.
+
+The task of inviting the guests, or of selecting among such as might
+advance their claims to partake of this dismal hospitality, was
+confided to the two trustees or stewards of the fund.  These
+gentlemen, like their deceased friend, were sombre humorists, who
+made it their principal occupation to number the sable threads in
+the web of human life, and drop all the golden ones out of the
+reckoning.  They performed their present office with integrity and
+judgment.  The aspect of the assembled company, on the day of the
+first festival, might not, it is true, have satisfied every beholder
+that these were especially the individuals, chosen forth from all
+the world, whose griefs were worthy to stand as indicators of the
+mass of human suffering.  Yet, after due consideration, it could not
+be disputed that here was a variety of hopeless discomfort, which,
+if it sometimes arose from causes apparently inadequate, was thereby
+only the shrewder imputation against the nature and mechanism of
+life.
+
+The arrangements and decorations of the banquet were probably
+intended to signify that death in life which had been the testator's
+definition of existence.  The hall, illuminated by torches, was hung
+round with curtains of deep and dusky purple, and adorned with
+branches of cypress and wreaths of artificial flowers, imitative of
+such as used to be strewn over the dead.  A sprig of parsley was
+laid by every plate.  The main reservoir of wine, was a sepulchral
+urn of silver, whence the liquor was distributed around the table in
+small vases, accurately copied from those that held the tears of
+ancient mourners.  Neither had the stewards--if it were their taste
+that arranged these details--forgotten the fantasy of the old
+Egyptians, who seated a skeleton at every festive board, and mocked
+their own merriment with the imperturbable grin of a death's-head.
+Such a fearful guest, shrouded in a black mantle, sat now at the
+head of the table.  It was whispered, I know not with what truth,
+that the testator himself had once walked the visible world with the
+machinery of that sane skeleton, and that it was one of the
+stipulations of his will, that he should thus be permitted to sit,
+from year to year, at the banquet which he had instituted. If so, it
+was perhaps covertly implied that he had cherished no hopes of bliss
+beyond the grave to compensate for the evils which he felt or
+imagined here.  And if, in their bewildered conjectures as to the
+purpose of earthly existence, the banqueters should throw aside the
+veil, and cast an inquiring glance at this figure of death, as
+seeking thence the solution otherwise unattainable, the only reply
+would be a stare of the vacant eye-caverns and a grin of the
+skeleton jaws.  Such was the response that the dead man had fancied
+himself to receive when he asked of Death to solve the riddle of his
+life; and it was his desire to repeat it when the guests of his
+dismal hospitality should find themselves perplexed with the same
+question.
+
+"What means that wreath?"  asked several of the company, while
+viewing the decorations of the table.
+
+They alluded to a wreath of cypress, which was held on high by a
+skeleton arm, protruding from within the black mantle.
+
+"It is a crown," said one of the stewards, "not for the worthiest,
+but for the wofulest, when he shall prove his claim to it."
+
+The guest earliest bidden to the festival was a man of soft and
+gentle character, who had not energy to struggle against the heavy
+despondency to which his temperament rendered him liable; and
+therefore with nothing outwardly to excuse him from happiness, he
+had spent a life of quiet misery that made his blood torpid, and
+weighed upon his breath, and sat like a ponderous night-fiend upon
+every throb of his unresisting heart. His wretchedness seemed as
+deep as his original nature, if not identical with it.  It was the
+misfortune of a second guest to cherish within his bosom a diseased
+heart, which had become so wretchedly sore that the continual and
+unavoidable rubs of the world, the blow of an enemy, the careless
+jostle of a stranger, and even the faithful and loving touch of a
+friend, alike made ulcers in it.  As is the habit of people thus
+afflicted, he found his chief employment in exhibiting these
+miserable sores to any who would give themselves the pain of viewing
+them.  A third guest was a hypochondriac, whose imagination wrought
+necromancy in his outward and inward world, and caused him to see
+monstrous faces in the household fire, and dragons in the clouds of
+sunset, and fiends in the guise of beautiful women, and something
+ugly or wicked beneath all the pleasant surfaces of nature.  His
+neighbor at table was one who, in his early youth, had trusted
+mankind too much, and hoped too highly in their behalf, and, in
+meeting with many disappointments, had become desperately soured.
+For several years back this misanthrope bad employed himself in
+accumulating motives for hating and despising his race,--such as
+murder, lust, treachery, ingratitude, faithlessness of trusted
+friends, instinctive vices of children, impurity of women, hidden
+guilt in men of saint-like aspect,--and, in short, all manner of
+black realities that sought to decorate themselves with outward
+grace or glory.  But at every atrocious fact that was added to his
+catalogue, at every increase of the sad knowledge which he spent his
+life to collect, the native impulses of the poor man's loving and
+confiding heart made him groan with anguish.  Next, with his heavy
+brow bent downward, there stole into the hall a man naturally
+earnest and impassioned, who, from his immemorial infancy, had felt
+the consciousness of a high message to the world; but, essaying to
+deliver it, had found either no voice or form of speech, or else no
+ears to listen.  Therefore his whole life was a bitter questioning
+of himself: "Why have not men acknowledged my mission?  Am I not a
+self-deluding fool?  What business have I on earth?  Where is my
+grave?"  Throughout the festival, he quaffed frequent draughts from
+the sepulchral urn of wine, hoping thus to quench the celestial fire
+that tortured his own breast and could not benefit his race.
+
+Then there entered, having flung away a ticket for a ball, a gay
+gallant of yesterday, who had found four or five wrinkles in his
+brow, and more gray hairs than he could well number on his head.
+Endowed with sense and feeling, he had nevertheless spent his youth
+in folly, but had reached at last that dreary point in life where
+Folly quits us of her own accord, leaving us to make friends with
+Wisdom if we can.  Thus, cold and desolate, he had come to seek
+Wisdom at the banquet, and wondered if the skeleton were she.  To
+eke out the company, the stewards had invited a distressed poet from
+his home in the almshouse, and a melancholy idiot from the street-
+corner.  The latter had just the glimmering of sense that was
+sufficient to make him conscious of a vacancy, which the poor
+fellow, all his life long, had mistily sought to fill up with
+intelligence, wandering up and down the streets, and groaning
+miserably because his attempts were ineffectual.  The only lady in
+the hall was one who had fallen short of absolute and perfect
+beauty, merely by the trifling defect of a slight cast in her left
+eye.  But this blemish, minute as it was, so shocked the pure ideal
+of her soul, rather than her vanity, that she passed her life in
+solitude, and veiled her countenance even from her own gaze.  So the
+skeleton sat shrouded at one end of the table, and this poor lady at
+the other,
+
+One other guest remains to be described.  He was a young man of
+smooth brow, fair cheek, and fashionable mien.  So far as his
+exterior developed him, he might much more suitably have found a
+place at some merry Christmas table, than have been numbered among
+the blighted, fate-stricken, fancy-tortured set of ill-starred
+banqueters.  Murmurs arose among the guests as they noted, the
+glance of general scrutiny which the intruder threw over his
+companions.  What had he to do among them?  Why did not the skeleton
+of the dead founder of the feast unbend its rattling joints, arise,
+and motion the unwelcome stranger from the board?
+
+"Shameful!" said the morbid man, while a new ulcer broke out in his
+heart.  "He comes to mock us! we shall be the jest of his tavern
+friends I--he will make a farce of our miseries, and bring it out
+upon the stage!"
+
+"O, never mind him!" said the hypochondriac, smiling sourly.  "He
+shall feast from yonder tureen of viper-soup; and if there is a
+fricassee of scorpions on the table, pray let him have his share of
+it.  For the dessert, he shall taste the apples of Sodom, then, if
+he like our Christmas fare, let him return again next year!"
+
+"Trouble him not," murmured the melancholy man, with gentleness.
+"What matters it whether the consciousness of misery come a few
+years sooner or later?  If this youth deem himself happy now, yet
+let him sit with us for the sake of the wretchedness to come."
+
+The poor idiot approached the young man with that mournful aspect of
+vacant inquiry which his face continually wore, and which caused
+people to say that he was always in search of his missing wits.
+After no little examination he touched the stranger's hand, but
+immediately drew back his own, shaking his head and shivering,
+
+"Cold, cold, cold!" muttered the idiot.
+
+The young man shivered too, and smiled.
+
+"Gentlemen, and you, madam," said one of the stewards of the
+festival, "do not conceive so ill either of our caution or judgment,
+as to imagine that we have admitted this young stranger--Gervayse
+Hastings by name--without a full investigation and thoughtful
+balance of his claims.  Trust me, not a guest at the table is better
+entitled to his seat."
+
+The steward's guaranty was perforce satisfactory.  The company,
+therefore, took their places, and addressed themselves to the
+serious business of the feast, but were soon disturbed by the
+hypochondriac, who thrust back his chair, complaining that a dish of
+stewed toads and vipers was set before him, and that there was green
+ditchwater in his cup of wine.  This mistake being amended, he
+quietly resumed his seat.  The wine, as it flowed freely from the
+sepulchral urn, seemed to come imbued with all gloomy inspirations;
+so that its influence was not to cheer, but either to sink the
+revellers into a deeper melancholy, or elevate their spirits to an
+enthusiasm of wretchedness.  The conversation was various.  They
+told sad stories about people who might have been Worthy guests at
+such a festival as the present.  They talked of grisly incidents in
+human history; of strange crimes, which, if truly considered, were
+but convulsions of agony; of some lives that had been altogether
+wretched, and of others, which, wearing a general semblance of
+happiness, had yet been deformed, sooner or later, by misfortune, as
+by the intrusion of a grim face at a banquet; of death-bed scenes,
+and what dark intimations might be gathered from the words of dying
+men; of suicide, and whether the more eligible mode were by halter,
+knife, poison, drowning, gradual starvation, or the fumes of
+charcoal.  The majority of the guests, as is the custom with people
+thoroughly and profoundly sick at heart, were anxious to make their
+own woes the theme of discussion, and prove themselves most
+excellent in anguish.  The misanthropist went deep into the
+philosophy of evil, and wandered about in the darkness, with now and
+then a gleam of discolored light hovering on ghastly shapes and
+horrid scenery.  Many a miserable thought, such as men have stumbled
+upon from age to age, did he now rake up again, and gloat over it as
+an inestimable gem, a diamond, a treasure far preferable to those
+bright, spiritual revelations of a better world, which are like
+precious stones from heaven's pavement.  And then, amid his lore of
+wretchedness he hid his face and wept.
+
+It was a festival at which the woful man of Uz might suitably have
+been a guest, together with all, in each succeeding age, who have
+tasted deepest of the bitterness of life.  And be it said, too, that
+every son or daughter of woman, however favored with happy fortune,
+might, at one sad moment or another, have claimed the privilege of a
+stricken heart, to sit down at this table. But, throughout the
+feast, it was remarked that the young stranger, Gervayse Hastings,
+was unsuccessful in his attempts to catch its pervading spirit.  At
+any deep, strong thought that found utterance, and which was torn
+out, as it were, from the saddest recesses of human consciousness,
+he looked mystified and bewildered; even more than the poor idiot,
+who seemed to grasp at such things with his earnest heart, and thus
+occasionally to comprehend them.  The young man's conversation was
+of a colder and lighter kind, often brilliant, but lacking the
+powerful characteristics of a nature that had been developed by
+suffering.
+
+"Sir," said the misanthropist, bluntly, in reply to some observation
+by Gervayse Hastings, "pray do not address me again. We have no
+right to talk together.  Our minds have nothing in common.  By what
+claim you appear at this banquet I cannot guess; but methinks, to a
+man who could say what you have just now said, my companions and
+myself must seem no more than shadows flickering on the wall.  And
+precisely such a shadow are you to us."
+
+The young man smiled and bowed, but, drawing himself back in his
+chair, he buttoned his coat over his breast, as if the banqueting-
+Ball were growing chill.  Again the idiot fixed his melancholy stare
+upon the youth, and murmured, "Cold! cold! cold!"
+
+The banquet drew to its conclusion, and the guests departed.
+Scarcely had they stepped across the threshold of the hall, when the
+scene that had there passed seemed like the vision of a sick fancy,
+or an exhalation from a stagnant heart.  Now and then, however,
+during the year that ensued, these melancholy people caught glimpses
+of one another, transient, indeed, but enough to prove that they
+walked the earth with the ordinary allotment of reality.  Sometimes
+a pair of them came face to face, while stealing through the evening
+twilight, enveloped in their sable cloaks.  Sometimes they casually
+met in churchyards.  Once, also, it happened that two of the dismal
+banqueters mutually started at recognizing each other in the noonday
+sunshine of a crowded street, stalking there like ghosts astray.
+Doubtless they wondered why the skeleton did not come abroad at
+noonday too.
+
+But whenever the necessity of their affairs compelled these
+Christmas guests into the bustling world, they were sure to
+encounter the young man who had so unaccountably been admitted to
+the festival.  They saw him among the gay and fortunate; they caught
+the sunny sparkle of his eye; they heard the light and careless
+tones of his voice, and muttered to themselves with such indignation
+as only the aristocracy of wretchedness could kindle, "The traitor!
+The vile impostor!  Providence, in its own good time, may give him a
+right to feast among us!"  But the young man's unabashed eye dwelt
+upon their gloomy figures as they passed him, seeming to say,
+perchance with somewhat of a sneer, "First, know my secret then,
+measure your claims with mine!"
+
+The step of Time stole onward, and soon brought merry Christmas
+round again, with glad and solemn worship in the churches, and
+sports, games, festivals, and everywhere the bright face of Joy
+beside the household fire.  Again likewise the hall, with its
+curtains of dusky purple, was illuminated by the death-torches
+gleaming on the sepulchral decorations of the banquet.  The veiled,
+skeleton sat in state, lifting the cypress-wreath above its head, as
+the guerdon of some guest illustrious in the qualifications which
+there claimed precedence.  As the stewards deemed the world
+inexhaustible in misery, and were desirous of recognizing it in all
+its forms, they had not seen fit to reassemble the company of the
+former year.  New faces now threw their gloom across the table.
+
+There was a man of nice conscience, who bore a blood-stain in his
+heart--the death of a fellow-creature--which, for his more
+exquisite torture, had chanced with such a peculiarity of
+circumstances, that he could not absolutely determine whether his
+will had entered into the deed or not.  Therefore, his whole life
+was spent in the agony of an inward trial for murder, with a
+continual sifting of the details of his terrible calamity, until his
+mind had no longer any thought, nor his soul any emotion,
+disconnected with it, There was a mother, too,--a mother once, but a
+desolation now,--who, many years before, had gone out on a pleasure-
+party, and, returning, found her infant smothered in its little bed.
+And ever since she has been tortured with the fantasy that her
+buried baby lay smothering in its coffin.  Then there was an aged
+lady, who had lived from time immemorial with a constant tremor
+quivering through her-frame.  It was terrible to discern her dark
+shadow tremulous upon the wall; her lips, likewise, were tremulous;
+and the expression of her eye seemed to indicate that her soul was
+trembling too.  Owing to the bewilderment and confusion which made
+almost a chaos of her intellect, it was impossible to discover what
+dire misfortune had thus shaken her nature to its depths; so that
+the stewards had admitted her to the table, not from any
+acquaintance with her history, but on the safe testimony of her
+miserable aspect.  Some surprise was expressed at the presence of a
+bluff, red-faced gentleman, a certain Mr. Smith, who had evidently
+the fat of many a rich feast within him, and the habitual twinkle of
+whose eye betrayed a disposition to break forth into uproarious
+laughter for little cause or none.  It turned out, however, that,
+with the best possible flow of spirits, our poor friend was
+afflicted with a physical disease of the heart, which threatened
+instant death on the slightest cachinnatory indulgence, or even that
+titillation of the bodily frame produced by merry thoughts.  In this
+dilemma he had sought admittance to the banquet, on the ostensible
+plea of his irksome and miserable state, but, in reality, with the
+hope of imbibing a life-preserving melancholy.
+
+A married couple had been invited from a motive of bitter humor, it
+being well understood that they rendered each other unutterably
+miserable whenever they chanced to meet, and therefore must
+necessarily be fit associates at the festival.  In contrast with
+these was another couple still unmarried, who had interchanged their
+hearts in early life, but had been divided by circumstances as
+impalpable as morning mist, and kept apart so long that their
+spirits now found it impossible to meet, Therefore, yearning for
+communion, yet shrinking from one another and choosing none beside,
+they felt themselves companionless in life, and looked upon eternity
+as a boundless desert.  Next to the skeleton sat a mere son of
+earth,--a hunter of the Exchange,--a gatherer of shining dust,--a
+man whose life's record was in his ledger, and whose soul's prison-
+house the vaults of the bank where he kept his deposits.  This
+person had been greatly perplexed at his invitation, deeming himself
+one of the most fortunate men in the city; but the stewards
+persisted in demanding his presence, assuring him that he had no
+conception how miserable he was.
+
+And now appeared a figure which we must acknowledge as our
+acquaintance of the former festival.  It was Gervayse Hastings,
+whose presence had then caused so much question and criticism, and
+who now took his place with the composure of one whose claims were
+satisfactory to himself and must needs be allowed by others. Yet his
+easy and unruffled face betrayed no sorrow.
+
+The well-skilled beholders gazed a moment into his eyes and shook
+their heads, to miss the unuttered sympathy--the countersign never
+to be falsified--of those whose hearts are cavern-mouths through
+which they descend into a region of illimitable woe and recognize
+other wanderers there.
+
+"Who is this youth?" asked the man with a bloodstain on his
+conscience.  "Surely he has never gone down into the depths!  I know
+all the aspects of those who have passed through the dark valley.
+By what right is he among us?"
+
+"Ah, it is a sinful thing to come hither without a sorrow," murmured
+the aged lady, in accents that partook of the eternal tremor which
+pervaded her whole being "Depart, young man!  Your soul has never
+been shaken, and, therefore, I tremble so much the more to look at
+you."
+
+"His soul shaken!  No; I'll answer for it," said bluff Mr. Smith,
+pressing his hand upon his heart and making himself as melancholy as
+he could, for fear of a fatal explosion of laughter.  "I know the
+lad well; he has as fair prospects as any young man about town, and
+has no more right among us miserable creatures than the child
+unborn.  He never was miserable and probably never will be!"
+
+"Our honored guests," interposed the stewards, "pray have patience
+with us, and believe, at least, that our deep veneration for the
+sacredness of this solemnity would preclude any wilful violation of
+it.  Receive this young man to your table.  It may not be too much
+to say, that no guest here would exchange his own heart for the one
+that beats within that youthful bosom!"
+
+"I'd call it a bargain, and gladly, too," muttered Mr. Smith, with a
+perplexing mixture of sadness and mirthful conceit.  "A plague upon
+their nonsense!  My own heart is the only really miserable one in
+the company; it will certainly be the death of me at last!"
+
+Nevertheless, as on the former occasion, the judgment of the
+stewards being without appeal, the company sat down.  The obnoxious
+guest made no more attempt to obtrude his conversation on those
+about him, but appeared to listen to the table-talk with peculiar
+assiduity, as if some inestimable secret, otherwise beyond his
+reach, might be conveyed in a casual word.  And in truth, to those
+who could understand and value it, there was rich matter in the
+upgushings and outpourings of these initiated souls to whom sorrow
+had been a talisman, admitting them into spiritual depths which no
+other spell can open.  Sometimes out of the midst of densest gloom
+there flashed a momentary radiance, pure as crystal, bright as the
+flame of stars, and shedding such a glow upon the mysteries of life,
+that the guests were ready to exclaim, "Surely the riddle is on the
+point of being solved!"  At such illuminated intervals the saddest
+mourners felt it to be revealed that mortal griefs are but shadowy
+and external; no more than the sable robes voluminously shrouding a
+certain divine reality, and thus indicating what might otherwise be
+altogether invisible to mortal eye.
+
+"Just now," remarked the trembling old woman, "I seemed to see
+beyond the outside.  And then my everlasting tremor passed away!"
+
+"Would that I could dwell always in these momentary gleams of
+light!" said the man of stricken conscience.  "Then the blood-stain
+in my heart would be washed clean away."
+
+This strain of conversation appeared so unintelligibly absurd to
+good Mr. Smith, that he burst into precisely the fit of laughter
+which his physicians had warned him against, as likely to prove
+instantaneously fatal.  In effect, he fell back in his chair a
+corpse, with a broad grin upon his face, while his ghost, perchance,
+remained beside it bewildered at its unpremeditated exit.  This
+catastrophe of course broke up the festival.
+
+"How is this?  You do not tremble!" observed the tremulous old woman
+to Gervayse Hastings, who was gazing at the dead man with singular
+intentness.  "Is it not awful to see him so suddenly vanish out of
+the midst of life,--this man of flesh and blood, whose earthly
+nature was so warm and strong?  There is a never-ending tremor in my
+soul, but it trembles afresh at, this!  And you are calm!"
+
+"Would that he could teach me somewhat!" said Gervayse Hastings,
+drawing a long breath.  "Men pass before me like shadows on the
+wall; their actions, passions, feelings, are flickerings of the
+light, and then they vanish!  Neither the corpse, nor yonder
+skeleton, nor this old woman's everlasting tremor, can give me what
+I seek."
+
+And then the company departed.
+
+We cannot linger to narrate, in such detail, more circumstances of
+these singular festivals, which, in accordance with the founder's
+will, continued to be kept with the regularity of an established
+institution.  In process of time the stewards adopted the custom of
+inviting, from far and near, those individuals whose misfortunes
+were prominent above other men's, and whose mental and moral
+development might, therefore, be supposed to possess a corresponding
+interest.  The exiled noble of the French Revolution, and the broken
+soldier of the Empire, were alike represented at the table.  Fallen
+monarchs, wandering about the earth, have found places at that
+forlorn and miserable feast. The statesman, when his party flung him
+off, might, if he chose it, be once more a great man for the space
+of a single banquet. Aaron Burr's name appears on the record at a
+period when his ruin--the profoundest and most striking, with more
+of moral circumstance in it than that of almost any other man--was
+complete in his lonely age.  Stephen Guard, when his wealth weighed
+upon him like a mountain, once sought admittance of his own accord.
+It is not probable, however, that these men had any lesson to teach
+in the lore of discontent and misery which might not equally well
+have been studied in the common walks of life. Illustrious
+unfortunates attract a wider sympathy, not because their griefs are
+more intense, but because, being set on lofty pedestals, they the
+better serve mankind as instances and bywords of calamity.
+
+It concerns our present purpose to say that, at each successive
+festival, Gervayse Hastings showed his face, gradually changing from
+the smooth beauty of his youth to the thoughtful comeliness of
+manhood, and thence to the bald, impressive dignity of age. He was
+the only individual invariably present.  Yet on every occasion there
+were murmurs, both from those who knew his character and position,
+and from them whose hearts shrank back as denying his companionship
+in their mystic fraternity.
+
+"Who is this impassive man?" had been asked a hundred times. "Has he
+suffered?  Has he sinned?  There are no traces of either. Then
+wherefore is he here?"
+
+"You must inquire of the stewards or of himself," was the constant
+reply.  "We seem to know him well here in our city, and know
+nothing of him but what is creditable and fortunate.  Yet hither he
+comes, year after year, to this gloomy banquet, and sits among the
+guests like a marble statue.  Ask yonder skeleton, perhaps that may
+solve the riddle!"
+
+It was in truth a wonder.  The life of Gervayse Hastings was not
+merely a prosperous, but a brilliant one.  Everything had gone well
+with him.  He was wealthy, far beyond the expenditure that was
+required by habits of magnificence, a taste of rare purity and
+cultivation, a love of travel, a scholar's instinct to collect a
+splendid library, and, moreover, what seemed a magnificent
+liberality to the distressed.  He had sought happiness, and not
+vainly, if a lovely and tender wife, and children of fair promise,
+could insure it.  He had, besides, ascended above the limit which
+separates the obscure from the distinguished, and had won a
+stainless reputation in affairs of the widest public importance.
+Not that he was a popular character, or had within him the
+mysterious attributes which are essential to that species of
+success.  To the public he was a cold abstraction, wholly destitute
+of those rich lines of personality, that living warmth, and the
+peculiar faculty of stamping his own heart's impression on a
+multitude of hearts, by which the people recognize their favorites.
+And it must be owned that, after his most intimate associates had
+done their best to know him thoroughly, and love him warmly, they
+were startled to find how little hold he had upon their affections.
+They approved, they admired, but still in those moments when the
+human spirit most craves reality, they shrank back from Gervayse
+Hastings, as powerless to give them what they sought.  It was the
+feeling of distrustful regret with which we should draw back the
+hand after extending it, in an illusive twilight, to grasp the hand
+of a shadow upon the wall.
+
+As the superficial fervency of youth decayed, this peculiar effect
+of Gervayse Hastings's character grew more perceptible. His
+children, when he extended his arms, came coldly to his knees, but
+never climbed them of their own accord.  His wife wept secretly, and
+almost adjudged herself a criminal because she shivered in the chill
+of his bosom.  He, too, occasionally appeared not unconscious of the
+chillness of his moral atmosphere, and willing, if it might be so,
+to warm himself at a kindly fire.  But age stole onward and benumbed
+him snore and more.  As the hoar-frost began to gather on him his
+wife went to her grave, and was doubtless warmer there; his children
+either died or were scattered to different homes of their own; and
+old Gervayse Hastings, unscathed by grief,--alone, but needing no
+companionship,--continued his steady walk through life, and still
+one very Christmas day attended at the dismal banquet.  His
+privilege as a guest had become prescriptive now.  Had he claimed
+the head of the table, even the skeleton would have been ejected
+from its seat.
+
+Finally, at the merry Christmas-tide, when he had numbered fourscore
+years complete, this pale, highbrowed, marble-featured old man once
+more entered the long-frequented hall, with the same impassive
+aspect that had called forth so much dissatisfied remark at his
+first attendance.  Time, except in matters merely external, had done
+nothing for him, either of good or evil.  As he took his place he
+threw a calm, inquiring glance around the table, as if to ascertain
+whether any guest had yet appeared, after so many unsuccessful
+banquets, who might impart to him the mystery--the deep, warm
+secret--the life within the life--which, whether manifested in joy
+or sorrow, is what gives substance to a world of shadows.
+
+"My friends," said Gervayse Hastings, assuming a position which his
+long conversance with the festival caused to appear natural, "you
+are welcome!  I drink to you all in this cup of sepulchral wine."
+
+The guests replied courteously, but still in a manner that proved
+them unable to receive the old man as a member of their sad
+fraternity.  It may be well to give the reader an idea of the
+present company at the banquet.
+
+One was formerly a clergyman, enthusiastic in his profession, and
+apparently of the genuine dynasty of those old Puritan divines whose
+faith in their calling, and stern exercise of it, had placed them
+among the mighty of the earth.  But yielding to the speculative
+tendency of the age, he had gone astray from the firm foundation of
+an ancient faith, and wandered into a cloud-region, where everything
+was misty and deceptive, ever mocking him with a semblance of
+reality, but still dissolving when he flung himself upon it for
+support and rest.  His instinct and early training demanded
+something steadfast; but, looking forward, he beheld vapors piled on
+vapors, and behind him an impassable gulf between the man of
+yesterday and to-day, on the borders of which he paced to and fro,
+sometimes wringing his hands in agony, and often making his own woe
+a theme of scornful merriment.  This surely was a miserable man.
+Next, there was a theorist,--one of a numerous tribe, although he
+deemed himself unique since the creation,--a theorist, who had
+conceived a plan by which all the wretchedness of earth, moral and
+physical, might be done away, and the bliss of the millennium at
+once accomplished.  But, the incredulity of mankind debarring him
+from action, he was smitten with as much grief as if the whole mass
+of woe which he was denied the opportunity to remedy were crowded
+into his own bosom. A plain old man in black attracted much of the
+company's notice, on the supposition that he was no other than
+Father Miller, who, it seemed, had given himself up to despair at
+the tedious delay of the final conflagration.  Then there was a man
+distinguished for native pride and obstinacy, who, a little while
+before, had possessed immense wealth, and held the control of a vast
+moneyed interest which he had wielded in the same spirit as a
+despotic monarch would wield the power of his empire, carrying on a
+tremendous moral warfare, the roar and tremor of which was felt at
+every fireside in the land.  At length came a crushing ruin,--a
+total overthrow of fortune, power, and character,--the effect of
+which on his imperious and, in many respects, noble and lofty nature
+might have entitled him to a place, not merely at our festival, but
+among the peers of Pandemonium.
+
+There was a modern philanthropist, who had become so deeply sensible
+of the calamities of thousands and millions of his fellow-creatures,
+and of the impracticableness of any general measures for their
+relief, that he had no heart to do what little good lay immediately
+within his power, but contented himself with being miserable for
+sympathy.  Near him sat a gentleman in a predicament hitherto
+unprecedented, but of which the present epoch probably affords
+numerous examples.  Ever since he was of capacity to read a
+newspaper, this person had prided himself on his consistent
+adherence to one political party, but, in the confusion of these
+latter days, had got bewildered and knew not whereabouts his party
+was.  This wretched condition, so morally desolate and disheartening
+to a man who has long accustomed himself to merge his individuality
+in the mass of a great body, can only be conceived by such as have
+experienced it.  His next companion was a popular orator who had
+lost his voice, and--as it was pretty much all that he had to lose--
+had fallen into a state of hopeless melancholy.  The table was
+likewise graced by two of the gentler sex,--one, a half-starved,
+consumptive seamstress, the representative of thousands just as
+wretched; the other, a woman of unemployed energy, who found herself
+in the world with nothing to achieve, nothing to enjoy, and nothing
+even to suffer. She had, therefore, driven herself to the verge of
+madness by dark breedings over the wrongs of her sex, and its
+exclusion from a proper field of action.  The roll of guests being
+thus complete, a side-table had been set for three or four
+disappointed office-seekers, with hearts as sick as death, whom the
+stewards had admitted partly because their calamities really
+entitled them to entrance here, and partly that they were in
+especial need of a good dinner.  There was likewise a homeless dog,
+with his tail between his legs, licking up the crumbs and gnawing
+the fragments of the feast,--such a melancholy cur as one sometimes
+sees about the streets without a master, and willing to follow the
+first that will accept his service.
+
+In their own way, these were as wretched a set of people as ever had
+assembled at the festival.  There they sat, with the veiled skeleton
+of the founder holding aloft the cypress-wreath, at one end of the
+table, and at the other, wrapped in furs, the withered figure of
+Gervayse Hastings, stately, calm, and cold, impressing the company
+with awe, yet so little interesting their sympathy that he might
+have vanished into thin air without their once exclaiming, "Whither
+is he gone?"
+
+"Sir," said the philanthropist, addressing the old man, "you have
+been so long a guest at this annual festival, and have thus been
+conversant with so many varieties of human affliction, that, not
+improbably, you have thence derived some great and important
+lessons.  How blessed were your lot could you reveal a secret by
+which all this mass of woe might be removed!"
+
+"I know of but one misfortune," answered Gervayse Hastings, quietly,
+"and that is my own."
+
+"Your own!" rejoined the philanthropist.  "And looking back on your
+serene and prosperous life, how can you claim to be the sole
+unfortunate of the human race?"
+
+"You will not understand it," replied Gervayse Hastings, feebly, and
+with a singular inefficiency of pronunciation, and sometimes putting
+one word for another.  "None have understood it, not even those who
+experience the like.  It is a chillness, a want of earnestness, a
+feeling as if what should be my heart were a thing of vapor, a
+haunting perception of unreality!  Thus seeming to possess all that
+other men have, all that men aim at, I have really possessed
+nothing, neither joy nor griefs.  All things, all persons,--as was
+truly said to me at this table long and long ago,--have been like
+shadows flickering on the wall.  It was so with my wife and
+children, with those who seemed my friends: it is so with
+yourselves, whom I see now before one.  Neither have I myself any
+real existence, but am a shadow like the rest."
+
+"And how is it with your views of a future life?" inquired the
+speculative clergyman.
+
+"Worse than with you," said the old man, in a hollow and feeble
+tone; "for I cannot conceive it earnestly enough to feel either hope
+or fear.  Mine,--mine is the wretchedness!  This cold heart,--this
+unreal life!  Ah! it grows colder still."
+
+It so chanced that at this juncture the decayed ligaments of the
+skeleton gave way, and the dry hones fell together in a heap, thus
+causing the dusty wreath of cypress to drop upon the table. The
+attention of the company being thus diverted for a single instant
+from Gervayse Hastings, they perceived, on turning again towards
+him, that the old man had undergone a change.  His shadow had ceased
+to flicker on the wall.
+
+
+"Well, Rosina, what is your criticism?" asked Roderick, as he rolled
+up the manuscript.
+
+"Frankly, your success is by no means complete," replied she. "It is
+true, I have an idea of the character you endeavor to describe; but
+it is rather by dint of my own thought than your expression."
+
+"That is unavoidable," observed the sculptor, "because the
+characteristics are all negative.  If Gervayse Hastings could have
+imbibed one human grief at the gloomy banquet, the task of
+describing him would have been infinitely easier.  Of such persons--
+and we do meet with these moral monsters now and then--it is
+difficult to conceive how they came to exist here, or what there is
+in them capable of existence hereafter.  They seem to be on the
+outside of everything; and nothing wearies the soul more than an
+attempt to comprehend them within its grasp."
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET ***
+By Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+***** This file should be named haw5510.txt or haw5510.zip ******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, haw5511.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, haw5510a.txt
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger  [widger@cecomet.net]
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
diff --git a/old/haw5510.zip b/old/haw5510.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..033aae3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/haw5510.zip