The idea of a deathless man appealed strongly to Hawthorne, who plays with the theme in various passages in his works and notebooks. In _A Virtuoso's Collection_, where Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, is door-keeper and where the collection includes a letter from the Flying Dutchman to his wife, together with a flask of the elixir of life, the virtuoso himself is none other than the Wandering Jew. He speaks of his destiny and says that human prayers will not avail to aid him. The touch of his hand is like ice, conveying a sense of spiritual as well as physical chill. The character appears also as one of the guests in _A Select Party_, of whom the author remarks: "This personage, however, had latterly grown so common by mingling in all sorts of society and appearing at the beck of every entertainer that he could hardly be deemed a proper guest in an exclusive circle." This bit of satire illustrates how common the theme had become at that time in fiction. There are various threads of narration tangled up with the Wandering Jew motif. He is said by some writers to have supernatural power to heal disease, while by others he is thought to be the helpless bearer of evil and death. Eugène Sue in his novel represents him as carrying the plague, knowing his awful destiny, yet, while wildly regretting it, powerless in the clutch of fate. Here he appears as a voluntary agent of good toward the Rennepont family and an involuntary minister of evil in other ways. An anonymous story[159] uses the same idea of the plague association but carries it further, for here the wanderer is not a personality but the plague itself, passing like a doom over the world, which shows how far that phase of the legend has gone. [159] _In the Track of the Wandering Jew._