Yet I resolved to remain perched on the look-out, and I
hugged to myself the thought that I alone was watching and wakeful,
while the great crowd of thinkers and searchers stood heedless and
indifferent, perhaps letting the most prerogative facts pass by
unnoticed. Several years elapsed before I was enabled to add to the contents of the
drawer; and the second find was in reality not a valuable one, for it
was a mere repetition of the first, with only the variation of another
and distant locality. Yet I gained something; for in the second case, as
in the first, the tragedy took place in a desolate and lonely country,
and so far my theory seemed justified. But the third piece was to me far
more decisive. Again, amongst outland hills, far even from a main road
of traffic, an old man was found done to death, and the instrument of
execution was left beside him. Here, indeed, there was rumor and
conjecture, for the deadly tool was a primitive stone axe, bound by gut
to the wooden handle, and surmises the most extravagant and improbable
were indulged in. Yet, as I thought with a kind of glee, the wildest
conjectures went far astray; and I took the pains to enter into
correspondence with the local doctor, who was called at the inquest. He,
a man of some acuteness, was dumfoundered. "It will not do to speak of
these things in country places, he wrote to me; but, frankly, Professor
Gregg, there is some hideous mystery here. I have obtained possession of
the stone axe, and have been so curious as to test its powers. I took it
into the back-garden of my house one Sunday afternoon when my family and
the servants were all out, and there, sheltered by the poplar hedges, I
made my experiments. I found the thing utterly unmanageable. Whether
there is some peculiar balance, some nice adjustment of weights, which
require incessant practice, or whether an effectual blow can be struck
only by a certain trick of the muscles, I do not know; but I assure you
that I went into the house with but a sorry opinion of my athletic
capacities. It was like an inexperienced man trying 'putting the
hammer;' the force exerted seemed to return on oneself, and I found
myself hurled backwards with violence, while the axe fell harmless to
the ground. On another occasion I tried the experiment with a clever
woodman of the place; but this man, who had handled his axe for forty
years, could do nothing with the stone implement, and missed every
stroke most ludicrously. In short, if it were not so supremely absurd, I
should say that for four thousand years no one on earth could have
struck an effective blow with the tool that undoubtedly was used to
murder the old man." This, as may be imagined, was to me rare news; and
afterwards, when I heard the whole story, and learned that the
unfortunate old man had babbled tales of what might be seen at night on
a certain wild hillside, hinting at unheard-of wonders, and that he had
been found cold one morning on the very hill in question, my exultation
was extreme, for I felt I was leaving conjecture far behind me. But the
next step was of still greater importance. I had possessed for many
years an extraordinary stone seal,--a piece of dull black stone, two
inches long from the handle to the stamp, and the stamping end a rough
hexagon an inch and a quarter in diameter. Altogether, it presented the
appearance of an enlarged tobacco-stopper of an old-fashioned make. It
had been sent to me by an agent in the East, who informed me that it had
been found near the site of the ancient Babylon. But the characters
engraved on the seal were to me an intolerable puzzle. Somewhat of the
cuneiform pattern, there were yet striking differences, which I
detected at the first glance, and all efforts to read the inscription on
the hypothesis that the rules for deciphering the arrow-headed writing
would apply proved futile. A riddle such as this stung my pride, and at
odd moments I would take the Black Seal out of the cabinet, and
scrutinize it with so much idle perseverance that every letter was
familiar to my mind, and I could have drawn the inscription from memory
without the slightest error. Judge then of my surprise, when I one day
received from a correspondent in the west of England a letter and an
enclosure that positively left me thunderstruck. I saw carefully traced
on a large piece of paper the very characters of the Black Seal, without
alteration of any kind, and above the inscription my friend had written:
_Inscription found on a limestone rock on the Grey Hills, Monmouthshire. Done in some red earth and quite recent_. I turned to the letter. My
friend wrote: "I send you the enclosed inscription with all due reserve. A shepherd who passed by the stone a week ago swears that there was then
no mark of any kind. The characters, as I have noted, are formed by
drawing some red earth over the stone, and are of an average height of
one inch. They look to me like a kind of cuneiform character, a good
deal altered, but this of course is impossible. It may be either a hoax
or more probably some scribble of the gypsies, who are plentiful enough
in this wild country. They have, as you are aware, many hieroglyphics
which they use in communicating with one another. I happened to visit
the stone in question two days ago in connection with a rather painful
incident which has occurred here." As may be supposed, I wrote immediately to my friend, thanking him for
the copy of the inscription, and asking him in a casual manner, the
history of the incident he mentioned. To be brief, I heard that a woman
named Cradock, who had lost her husband a day before, had set out to
communicate the sad news to a cousin who lived some five miles away. She
took a short cut which led by the Gray Hills. Mrs. Cradock, who was then
quite a young woman, never arrived at her relative's house. Late that
night a farmer who had lost a couple of sheep, supposed to have wandered
from the flock, was walking over the Gray Hills, with a lantern and his
dog. His attention was attracted by a noise, which he described as a
kind of wailing, mournful and pitiable to hear; and, guided by the
sound, he found the unfortunate Mrs. Cradock crouched on the ground by
the limestone rock, swaying her body to and fro, and lamenting and
crying in so heart-rending a manner that the farmer was, as he says, at
first obliged to stop his ears, or he would have run away. The woman
allowed herself to be taken home, and a neighbor came to see to her
necessities. All the night she never ceased her crying, mixing her
lament with words of some unintelligible jargon, and when the doctor
arrived he pronounced her insane. She lay on her bed for a week, now
wailing, as people said, like one lost and damned for eternity, and now
sunk in a heavy coma; it was thought that grief at the loss of her
husband had unsettled her mind, and the medical man did not at one time
expect her to live.