The Rhode Island American, And General Advertiser

MISCELLANY.

THE SLEEP-TALKER.
FROM THE NEW-YORK COLUMBIAN.

To the Editor.

Sir—The inclosed is description, in part, and correct as far as it goes, of one of the most celebrated SLEEP-TALKERS which has appeared upon the footstool for two thousand years. Please publish it; it may give occasion for the display of much skeptical ingenuity. Very truly yours,
ALFIERI.

Extract of a letter from a gentleman in the Western District to his friend in this city, dated March 20, 1814.

Dear WILLIAM—I went last evening with our friends, S. and H. to hear the famous Semale somnilequist, or sleep-talker of whom I said something in my last. We went at an early hour, that we might have an opportunity of conversing with her while waking, and of laying in stores for skepticism!—She is a plump, hale country lass of nineteen, rather above the middle size; of a smooth, equal, vacant tranquility of visage, without mental vivacity or rigour. You would pronounce her eye to be good; but it is unsteady, wild and capricious, with an unusual, if you please, say sickly, dilation of the pupil. She is taciturn and diffident, with a heavy, languid drawl of utterance, which pains you. Our conversation was of a critical cast; ran mostly upon facts relating to herself; her parentage, nativity, age, education, health, accidents, religion, &c. and the amazing unconscious faculty of talking in her sleep. She followed all our questions in a regular pace—she anticipated nothing but on the last head spoke with reluctance, and in a manner which betrayed a deep sensibility of her misfortune. It was not a reluctance called in to resist our incivility: it was female delicacy, busy in secreting a deformity.

She informed us that she had been in this way about two years, and was not sensible of any bodily disorder which could occasion it. She is of the Baptist sect, and for many years has been a zealous and fervent devotee, and when sleeping, her mind, taking the pious tendency of her waking hours, appears to be wholly occupied with subjects of religion. On this head she appears to be intuitively prepared to meet questions the most dark and abstruse. She answers with promptness—with multifarious remark—right onward, without repetition—to a total exhaustion of her subject, and not unfrequently of herself. These facts, the people with whom she lived, and who had been acquainted with her from her infancy, united in confirming. The object of our visit being attained, and our curiosity more strongly excited, we retired to a neighbour's for an hour, and returned to full gratification. She had been in bed some time, and in a few moments we heard her commence—the doors were thrown open and we all entered. It was a stormy inclement night, and 30 or 40 auditors only attended—it was not uncommon, we were informed, for three or four hundred to be present.

She opened with a prayer of half an hour, and delivered herself with great distinctness, in a clear, harmonious, unhesitating, animated tone of voice, with much devotional zeal and attracting fervour—when through, she sighed and groaned as in bodily anguish, for ten or twelve minutes—her chest hove—she grated her teeth and catched her breath, as one does with a palpitation of the heart. At a proper interval, some one who belonged to the house, calling her mildly by her name, observed that Elder somebody, his name I forget, had come some distance to see her. On this, she laboured a moment as for breath, when she commenced and went through with a most elegant exhortation, addressed to him personally, on the subject of his duties; urging him to diligence, assiduity and perseverance in his calling—painting in colours of delicious ecstasy, the pleasures of the life to come, for the life well spent: and denouncing in full solemnity, with the shuddering terrors of eternal damnation, the sentinel who slumbered or winked upon the watch—Covering-interlarding her discourse with many pertinent scriptural allusions, and in a copiousness of language, which indeed very much astonished us. The Elder in the mean time,
pale, amazed.
All gaze, all wonder
Eying, in tremulous meekness, the oracular corpse which lay before him, in deep dead sleep, interwove the sentiments which dropt from it, with the awful mysteries of supernatural—"Saul Saul! why persecutest thou me?"—and wept in silent obsequiousness. In fact, the deep attention of the auditors—the sighs of the women—the pattering of the hail the howling of the tempest—united with the speaking corpse, as it appeared, uttering its awful warnings to mortality—offered one of those moments of retirement to the soul, when we shudder and shiver in sublimity, like a culprit at Rome, with his heels to the precipice: indeed, I was ten times within an ace of coiling up my logic and uniting in the sympathies of the crowd.

Having finished her address to the elder, she relapsed again into the same convulsions which she had in her first interval, but visibly in greater pain: it was the contortion of an Incubus: it was the last conscious grasp of life to its fixture: she was as colourless as death This unexpected and frightful debility of the young lady excited our curiosity, and gave rise to a conversation with the lady of the house upon the subject. She told us that three nights before, the company had so multiplied questions upon her that she was driven to a state of the most alarming exhaustion. and whenever this happened, it required six, eight, and sometimes ten days of kind attention, caution and forbearance, to recruit her. We were very sorry for this information. as we were obliged to give over asking her many questions with which we had come prepared. The company on this information immediately broke up and we retired.

Now, friend William, what do you think of all this? Get along as soon as possible with all your doubts; take it as a fact that it is no imposture, no delusion; and then let me hear from you.
B.