Mr. Eternity by Aaron Thier

kit. He knew not the use of this fine equipment, yet he was not troubled, and made light of it all, as for example by holding up a shaving basin and saying, Oh what is this, oh I know, it is the enchanted helmet of Diego Sotelo, and placing it thereafter upon his head.
    All might have continued easy and comfortable had not Dr. Dan been seized by a remarkable fancy. This happened one day when he was called to Melanie plantation, upon an adjacent island, in order to attend the planter’s wife, their own physician having been poisoned, I think, or else having simply wasted away, as happened so often with Europeans in that climate. I accompanied Dr. Dan on this journey, yet we could not bring Quaco with us, for he had to attend to the burns and ratt bites that afflicted our own slaves. Thus I was witness to my friend’s confoundment before his task. Simply guessing and playing at his role as an actor might, he caused this poor woman’s cloathing to be burned, saying it was necessary to destroy the animal contagion . After this he fumigated her bed chamber with tabacco, oakum, sulphur, & aromatic wood. Covering his bets, so to say, for he was a prodigious gambler, he now also gave her volatile salts and Jesuit’s bark, and he gave her to hold one cocomber, which would draw out the fever by its chill. Lastly he instructed the lady’s maid, one Virginia, to anoint her mistress’s fundament with tabacco oil and balsam of saltpeter.
    It was now that Dr. Dan succumbed to his own imagination, as it were, for having knock’d the mistress unconscious with all this medisin, our next concern was to go to the kitchens for some food, and here, in the heat and sweat of the ovens, where a grate feast was being prepared, Dr. Dan spied a woman whom, as he insisted later, he had pursued through all the ages of the world. This was his beloved Anna Gloria, whom he had seen first in Sevil, where she stood selling Fish even as he wayed anchor upon the voyage of Discoverie undertaken that year by the Genoese Christopheros Colombo, and he had seen her again in the jungles of the Oroonoque, and once again in London, and now they were met in the islands of the Bahamas.
    He said later that she had grown older (she would have been more than two centuries of age herself), & her hair it was darker, & her skin also, the effect of servitude, yet he knew very well it was the same woman. Never had he spoken of her before, but he said that not a day had passed without it should happen that he thought of her. He said that even on that first occasion so many years ago, gazing across the water in Sevil, he had pledged to himself that he would make her his wife, and he remembered his promise now.
    Reader, what could I make of this? What can I make of it even now, as an old man, gazing back at the landscape of youth, which shimmers and jerks in the golden haze of memory?
    He walk’d up to her and took her hand, which she snatched away, and he said, It’s you. She frown’d, and said, Of course, why, you are Lord Herforshire, & he said Why no my dear not a Lord, & she said Forgive me now I realize you’re the magistrate I did not recognize you with your trousers on, & he said No no no, now in some pain. He said, I saw you in Sevil, I called to you, what were you doing, were you selling fishe?
    Now this prettie woman looked upon him as if upon a clam that would not open. Was I selling fish? she said. Fish?
    And in London, said Dr. Dan, was it you? What were you doing in London?
    If it was I, said she, daring a slight look at the other women in the room, let us not speak of what I was doing. Suffice it to say you left me there to do it.
    Now Dr. Dan was very embarrassed, and nearly heartbroke I think, saying he had not had any monie, for he had just gotten out of Newgate, & before that he had been a Pyrate, & was luckie they had not hanged him till he was dead.
    This woman did not know him, as I saw very plainly, but she was resolv’d to pretend. Said she, Very