Round the Fire Stories Chapter 1 - The Leather Funnel

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Story One of Round the Fire Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Story One. The Leather Funnel.
My friend Lionel Dacker lived in the Avenue de Vagram, Paris. His house was that small one, with the iron railings and grass plot in front of it, on the left-hand side as you pass down from the Hôte de Triomphe. I fancy that it had been there long before the Avenue was constructed, for the gray tiles were stained with lichens and the walls were mildewed and discolored with age. It looked a small house from the street, five windows in front, if I remember right, but it deepened into a single long chamber at the back. It was here that Dacker had that singular library of occult literature and the fantastic curiosities which served as a hobby for himself, and an amusement for his friends. A wealthy man of refined and eccentric tastes, he had spent much of his life and fortune in gathering together what was said to be a unique private collection of Talmudic, Kabbalistic and magical works, many of them of great rarity and value. His tastes leaned toward the marvelous and the monstrous, and I have heard that his experiments in the direction of the unknown have passed all the bounds of civilization and of decorum.
To his English friends he never alluded to such matters, and took the tone of the student and virtuoso, but a Frenchman whose tastes were of the same nature has assured me that the worst excesses of the black mass have been perpetrated in that large and lofty hall which is lined with the shells of his books and the cases of his museum.
Dacker's appearance was enough to show that his deep interest in the psychic matters was intellectual rather than spiritual. There was no trace of asceticism upon his heavy face, but there was much mental force in his huge dome-like skull which curved upward from amongst his thinning locks like a snowpeak above its fringe of fir-trees. His knowledge was greater than his wisdom, and his powers were far superior to his character.
The small, bright eyes varied deeply in his fleshy face, twinkled with intelligence and an unabated curiosity of life, but they were the eyes of a sensualist and an egotist. Enough of the man, for he is dead now, poor devil, dead at the very time that he had made sure that he had at last discovered the elixir of life. It is not with his complex character that I have to deal, but with the very strange and inexplicable incident which had its rise in my visit to him in the early spring of the year 82 I had known Dacher in England, for my researches in the Assyrian Room of the British Museum had been conducted at the time when he was endeavouring to establish a mystic and esoteric meaning in the Babylonian tablets, and this community of interests had brought us together. Chance remarks had led to daily conversation and that to something verging upon friendship. I had promised him that on my next visit to Paris I would call upon him. At the time when I was able to fulfil my compact I was living in a cottage at Fontainebleau, and as the evening trains were inconvenient he asked me to spend the night in his house. I have only one spare couch, said he, pointing to a broad sofa in his large salon. I hope that you will manage to be comfortable there.
It was a singular bedroom, with its high walls of brown volumes, but there could be no more agreeable furniture to a bookworm like myself, and there is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint subtle reek which comes from an ancient book. I assured him that I could desire no more charming chamber and no more congenial surroundings. If the fittings are neither convenient nor conventional they are at least costly, said he, looking round at his shelves, I have expended nearly a quarter of a million of money upon these objects which surround you. Books, weapons, gems, carvings, tapestries, images— there is hardly a thing here which has not its history, and it is generally one worth telling.
He was seated as he spoke at one side of the open fireplace and I at the other. His reading table was on his right, and the strong lamp above it ringed it with a very vivid circle of golden light. A half-rolled palimpsest lay in the center, and around it were many quaint articles of bric-a-brac. One of these was a large funnel, such as is used for filling wine-gasques. It appeared to be made of black wood, and to be rimmed with discolored brass. That is a curious thing, I remarked. What is the history of that? Ah, said he, it is the very question which I have had occasion to ask myself. I would give a good deal to know. Take it in your hands and examine it. I did so, and found that what I had imagined to be wood was in reality leather, though age had dried it into an extreme hardness. It was a large funnel, and might hold a quart when full. The brass rim encircled the wide end, but the narrow was also tipped with metal. What do you make of it? asked Dacker. I should imagine that it belonged to some vintner or maltster in the Middle Ages, said I. I have seen in England leather and drinking flaggans of the seventeenth century, blackjacks as they were called, which were of the same color and hardness as this filler. I dare say that the date would be about the same, said Dacker, and no doubt also it was used for filling a vessel with liquid. If my suspicions are correct, however, it was a queer vintner who used it and a very singular cask which was filled. Do you observe nothing strange at the spout end of the funnel?