The Angel of the Odd

(1844)

THE ANGEL OF THE ODD

[From The Columbian Magazine, October, 1844.]

It was a chilly November afternoon. I had just consummated an
unusually hearty dinner, of which the dyspeptic _truffe_ formed not
the least important item, and was sitting alone in the dining-room
with my feet upon the fender and at my elbow a small table which I had
rolled up to the fire, and upon which were some apologies for dessert,
with some miscellaneous bottles of wine, spirit, and _liqueur_. In the
morning I had been reading Glover's _Leonidas_, Wilkie's _Epigoniad_,
Lamartine's _Pilgrimage_, Barlow's _Columbiad_, Tuckerman's _Sicily_,
and Griswold's _Curiosities_, I am willing to confess, therefore, that
I now felt a little stupid. I made effort to arouse myself by frequent
aid of Lafitte, and all failing, I betook myself to a stray newspaper
in despair. Having carefully perused the column of "Houses to let,"
and the column of "Dogs lost," and then the columns of "Wives and
apprentices runaway," I attacked with great resolution the editorial
matter, and reading it from beginning to end without understanding a
syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese, and so
re-read it from the end to the beginning, but with no more
satisfactory result. I was about throwing away in disgust

This folio of four pages, happy work
Which not even critics criticise,

when I felt my attention somewhat aroused by the paragraph which
follows:

"The avenues to death are numerous and strange. A London paper
mentions the decease of a person from a singular cause. He was playing
at 'puff the dart,' which is played with a long needle inserted in
some worsted, and blown at a target through a tin tube. He placed the
needle at the wrong end of the tube, and drawing his breath strongly
to puff the dart forward with force, drew the needle into his throat.
It entered the lungs, and in a few days killed him."

Upon seeing this I fell into a great rage, without exactly knowing
why. "This thing," I exclaimed, "is a contemptible falsehood--a poor
hoax--the lees of the invention of some pitiable penny-a-liner, of
some wretched concocter of accidents in Cocaigne. These fellows
knowing the extravagant gullibility of the age set their wits to work
in the imagination of improbable possibilities, of odd accidents as
they term them, but to a reflecting intellect (like mine, I added, in
parenthesis, putting my forefinger unconsciously to the side of my
nose), to a contemplative understanding such as I myself possess, it
seems evident at once that the marvelous increase of late in these
'odd accidents' is by far the oddest accident of all. For my own part,
I