you, await the sequel. Those burning words told the story of that
mistake which had draped in despair our earthly lives. They were no
reflection from my own mind. In the self-concentration of my
disappointment, I had never dreamed that I alone was in fault,--that I
should have anchored my hope on somewhat more defined than the
voiceless intelligence of sympathy. But the very reproach of the
mysterious visitor brought with it a conviction, positive and
indubitable, that the spiritual portion of our being possesses the
power to act upon the material perception of another, without aid from
material elements. From time to time I have known, beyond the
possibility of deception, that the kindred spirit was still my
companion, my own inalienable possession, in spite of all factitious
ties, of all physical intervention.

"Have you heard that among certain tribes of the North-American Indians
are men who possess an art which enables them to endure torture and
actual death without apparent suffering or even consciousness? I once
chanced to fall in with one of these tribes, then living in Louisiana,
now removed to the far West, and was permitted to witness some
fantastic rites, half warlike, half religious, in which, however,
there was nothing noticeable except this trance-like condition, which
some of the warriors seemed to command at pleasure, manifested by a
tense rigidity of the features and muscles, and a mental exaltation
which proved to be both clairvoyant and clairoyant: a state analogous
to that of hypnotism, or the artificial sleep produced by gazing
fixedly on a near, bright object, and differing only in degree from
the nervous or imaginative control which has been known to arrest and
cure disease, which chained St. Simeon Stylites to his pillar, and
sustains the Hindoo fakirs in their apparently superhuman vigils. These
children of Nature had probed with direct simplicity some of the deep