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Elf Trap

IN THIS our well-advertised, modern world, crammed with engines,
death-dealing shells, life-dealing serums, and science, he who listens
to "old wives' tales" is counted idle. He who believes them, a
superstitious fool. Yet there are some legends which have a strange,
deathless habit of recrudescence in many languages and lands.

Of one such I have a story to tell. It was related to me by a
well-known specialist in nervous diseases, not as an instance of the
possible truth behind fable, but as a curious case in which--I quote
his words--"the delusions of a diseased brain were reflected by a
second and otherwise sound mentality."

No doubt his view was the right one. And yet, at the finish, I had
the strangest flash of feeling. As if, somewhere, some time, I, like
young Wharton, had stood and seen against blue sky--Elva, of the sky-
hued scarf and the yellow honeysuckles.

But my part is neither to feel nor surmise. I will tell the story
as I heard it, save for substitution of fictitious names for the real
ones. My quotations from the red notebook are verbatim.

Theron Tademus, A.A.S., F.E.S., D.S., et cetera, occupied the
chair of biology in a not-unfamed university. He was the author of a
treatise on cytology, since widely used as a textbook, and of several
important brochures on the more obscure infusoria. As a boy he had
been--in appearance--a romantically charming person. The age of
thirty-seven found him still handsome in a cold, fine-drawn manner,
but almost inhumanly detached from any save scientific interests.

Then, at the height of his career, he died. Having entered his
class-room with intent to deliver the first lecture of the fall term,
he walked to his desk, laid down a small, red note-book, turned,
opened his mouth, went ghastly white and subsided. His assistant,
young Wharton, was first to reach him and first to discover the
shocking truth.

Tademus was unmarried, and his will bequeathed all he possessed to
the university.

The little red book was not at first regarded as important.
Supposed to contain notes for his lecture, it was laid aside. On being
at last read, however, by his assistant in course of arranging his
papers, the book was found to contain not notes, but a diary covering
the summer just passed.

Barring the circumstances of one peculiar incident, Wharton
already knew the main facts of that summer.

Tademus, at the insistence of his physician--the specialist
aforesaid--had spent July and August in the Carolina Mountains not far
north from the famous resort, Asheville. Dr. Locke was friend as well
as medical adviser, and he lent his patient the use of a bungalow he
owned there.

It was situated in a beautiful, but lonely spot, to which the
nearest settlement was Carcassonne. In the valley below stood a tiny
railroad station, but Carcassonne was not built up around this, nor
was it a town at all in the ordinary sense.

A certain landscape painter had once raised him a house on that
mountainside, at a place chosen for its magnificent view. Later, he
was wont to invite thither, for summer sketching, one or two of his
more favored pupils. Later still, he increased this number. For their
accommodation other structures were raised near his mountain studio,
and the Blue Ridge summer class became an established fact, with a
name of its own and a rather large membership.

Two roads led thither from the valley. One, that most in use by
the artist colonists, was as good and broad as any Carolina mountain
road could hope to be. The other, a winding, narrow, yellow track,
passed the lonely bungalow of Dr. Locke, and at last split into two
paths, one of which led on to further heights, the second to
Carcassonne.

The distance between colony and bungalow was considerable, and
neither was visible to the other. Tademus was not interested in art,
and, as disclosed by the red book, he was not even aware of
Carcassonne's existence until some days after his arrival at the
bungalow.

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Elf Trap