The hero of this hazardous exploration through Hell is Hiprah Hunt, a lecturer, reformer, ex-preacher, poet and president of a Dante Club.

Hiprah Hunt has no tolerance for the modern philosophy that denies the existence of Hell. As a preacher he was what men of the present day call a “back number.”

Despite “higher criticism” he continually and earnestly advocates the justice of future punishment, and for this reason is known in the town where he lives as “Hell-fire Hunt.”

Not unlikely his belief in a Demon-haunted Hell ruled over by a personal Devil is in part due to atavism, for Mr. Hunt is a descendant of the illustrious Hunts who lent their aid to the extermination of witches in that part of New England where witchcraft once flourished.

As President of a Dante Club he collected many books on the subject of future retribution. Among them (some 80 volumes) he chiefly prizes Dante’s Inferno. Whenever he is given an opportunity he will deliver a lecture on Dante and his work. In short, Hell books have so thoroughly absorbed his mind that he becomes convinced that the under-world is as much a reality as the upper one.

As a result of continual thinking on one subject, and that subject a hot one, it was frequently hinted that Mr. Hunt’s brains were shrivelling up. Whether that is true or not, he became imbued with the idea that he must find the Infernal Regions and prove to the world that the place is not a myth.

In the Fall of 1900 Mr. Hunt mysteriously disappeared from home. For six weeks nothing was seen or heard of him. When he returned he set to work immediately and wrote a poem consisting of sixty-eight cantos of blank verse, curiously mixed with prose, quotations and numerous foot-notes. This poem, he declares, is the account of a six weeks’ journey through Hell.

Mr. Hunt’s original manuscript which is in possession of the writer, together with odd charts, maps, diagrams and thermometric records, all of them bearing marks of having come from a very hot region, are strong proofs of the authenticity of his exploration.

Perhaps it is unnecessary to add that the author has taken many liberties with Mr. Hunt’s text. The condition of the documents necessitated certain guess-work, and he has freely added a number of Inferno pictures that were drawn long before Hiprah Hunt’s valuable papers came to his notice.

If he has illuminated the dark and serious subject with a suspicion of fun—it is meant to convey the hope he feels for all sinners like himself, that some relief of a slightly humorous nature may be found even in Hell.

A. Y.

There are many portraits of Dante giving a more soulfully poetic cast to his countenance and which are much more pleasing for admirers of the great Florentine, to look upon, than the one reproduced here; but this is the first portrait ever published which is intended to portray the way the poet must really have felt at the termination of his trip through the Infernal Regions.

A portrait of Hiprah Hunt in his library which contains the following well-thumbed books: John Bunyan’s “Sighs from Hell,” Jonathan Edwards’s pamphlet on “The Justice of Endless Punishment,” Christopher Love’s “Hell’s Terror,” William Cooper’s “Three Discourses Concerning the Reality, the Extremity, and the Absolute Eternity of Hell Punishments,” Jeremy Taylor on “Pains of Hell,” and Alexander Jephson’s “The Certainty and Importance of a Future Judgment and Everlasting Retribution.”

Besides these he possesses several histories of the Devil and many old prints pertaining to the same subject.