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resuscitated fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle of
mine, then lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour.
On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer below
zero, the brain works with much vivacity; and the next moment I had
seen the circumstance transplanted from India and the tropics to
the Adirondack wilderness and the stringent cold of the Canadian
border. Here then, almost before I had begun my story, I had two
countries, two of the ends of the earth involved: and thus though
the notion of the resuscitated man failed entirely on the score of
general acceptation, or even (as I have since found) acceptability,
it fitted at once with my design of a tale of many lands; and this
decided me to consider further of its possibilities. The man who
should thus be buried was the first question: a good man, whose
return to life would be hailed by the reader and the other
characters with gladness? This trenched upon the Christian
picture, and was dismissed. If the idea, then, was to be of any
use at all for me, I had to create a kind of evil genius to his
friends and family, take him through many disappearances, and make
this final restoration from the pit of death, in the icy American
wilderness, the last and the grimmest of the series. I need not
tell my brothers of the craft that I was now in the most
interesting moment of an author's life; the hours that followed
that night upon the balcony, and the following nights and days,
whether walking abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were hours of
unadulterated joy. My mother, who was then living with me alone,
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