a vague term. I speak reverently; but the vulgar meaning of the word miracle-an effect without a cause-I am inclined to dispute. Because a phenomenon should occur only once or twice in the history of the world, is no reason why we should deny the existence of a law of which such a phenomenon is the natural and simple result, as immutable and perfect as that which combines the gases of the atmosphere, or rolls the planets round the sun, although it may be in the Divine disposition of things that circumstances only once or twice in a century should call that law into action."

"I don't quite understand you," said I. "Pliny tells us of a shower of quicksilver. Do you believe in the existence of a law, of which quicksilver showers is the natural and simple result ?"

"I am not prepared," said Morton, "to say how far Pliny might or might not have been deceived as to what he stated. But all I contend is, that the rarity of the effect is no argument against the permanence of the cause. Thus, there is always electricity in the air, though not always thunder-storms -a certain condition of the electricity produces the thunderstorm.

Were it

(as it is not) in the power of science to produce that condition at will, thunderstorms might be produced at will; but whether there are thunderstorms or not, the laws of electricity remain unaltered: it is only circumstances that differ, when their results are varied."

"All this is neither here nor there," cried the parson: 66 revenons à nos moutons. As for haunted houses, you declare

"

"Simply that the notion is not so unphilosophical nor illogical as it at first sight seems to be."

"As how?" inquired the parson.

66

Thought," said Morton, as though more to himself than to us, "is like a child's picture-alphabet."

"I don't see the resemblance," said I.

"Why," he continued, "if I speak to you of an elephant, a monkey, or a ship, you have in your mind's eye forthwith a picture of a monkey, an elephant, and a ship, and these objects become to you distinct ideas; but were I to speak to one not conversant with the terms of geology, of an icthyosaurus, an iguanodon, or a teradactyle, he has no pic

ture in his head of these animals, and they are words, not ideas, to him." "Well?" said I.

Well, these pictures are mostly so rapid and involuntary, as it were, that we are generally unconscious of them; but if, in the past life of either of you, there be any event to which you are in the habit of looking back with emotion, I am sure that you will admit that the memory-picture is a very vivid one. Did the act take place in a room? You see, again, the very spots on the carpet, the chairs in their old places, the pattern on the walls. Some one is just going to speak: you know what he will say; the light shines slant through the window; the clock has begun to strike; the mouse is scratching behind the wainscoat; - all just as it was the very moment that some thought, or word, or look flashed upon you, and changed your lifetime. Did it take place in a garden? The roses are still hanging heavy in the dew; a snail is just creeping over the gardenwalk; the hollyhock is leaning against the wall; a cloud is passing over the sky;-a great fact striding over these has stamped them into permanence."

"But what does all this lead to ?" interrupted the parson.

"Suppose," said Morton, "that such an event had taken place in the room where we are now sitting-suppose, for example's sake, that you or I, in this very chamber, at this very time of day, had committed some great crime a murder, shall I say?"

"God forbid," ejaculated the par

Certainly," said I.

"That, in fact, the memory of the murder will become the hell of the murderer, in a more subtile organisation of being; for we must not, I think, consider hell and heaven to be places only, but chiefly conditions of the mind."

"That is true," said the parson.

"Well, what is the fact?" continued the other. "I think of London, Rome, Naples, Paris; and, for the time being, my thought is in London, Rome, Naples, or Paris, as the case may be.

It is true that I, my identity, that is, the whole sum of my consciousness, is not at these places, because my other faculties and physical senses, being confined to the body, apart from which they have no action, cannot follow my thought. But consider for a moment what happens when the body is destroyed. With the physical frame, the physical faculties must cease. What remains? The thought. Pure, spiritual, absolute thought, must then become the centre of identity."

"Well?" said we both.

"Well, and if, remembering in that altered state, from the uttermost deeps of remorse and sorrow, that crime, here by me committed, I should have occasion to think of this room wherein the act had taken place, my thought would be here, and not my thought as it is now, a mere mental effort, but my whole identity comprised in my thought. In fact, I should be here; and you, sitting here as you now are, conversing together, or alone, as it might happen, would be in the presence of an awful element of terror and pain."

"Yet," said the parson, "it does not seem to me at all in the consequence of that fact, that we should be conscious of such a presence."

"I don't know how far the very walls might not be prescient of horror in such a case," said Morton

gloomily. "Has it not frequently happened to you in life to fall in the way of some face or nature which, without any accountable cause, was so antipathetic and repellant to you, that the presence of it has become insupportable, in spite of your own efforts to the contrary, in spite of fair features, or soft words? And what, I ask, could be more antipathetic to our common nature than

"Truly," interrupted the parson, "I don't see, on that account, how an existence, intangible to all physical senses, should so far affect my eyesight as that I should be able to behold what is formless and inconceivable ; and if the ghost be invisible to me, he is non existent as far as I am concerned."

you not? that it is the reflexion of an object on the retina of the eye, communicated by a nerve to the brain."

"Well, I think that is a fair definition," said the parson.

"Yet behold!" continued Morton. "Your dearest friend passes you in the street; you are absorbed in thought; you do not see him; you pass him by. Yet he is not the less reflected on the retina of your eye, or telegraphed therefrom to your brain. What then? You accept only the evidence of your senses, and must in consequence affirm that he did not pass you by in the street; as far as you are concerned, in fact, he is non-existent. We hear of men who have lost a leg, or an arm, and yet feel pain in a finger, or a toe, though these may be rotting at the time in a dissecting-room."

"Oh," said the parson, "all sensation is, of course, upon the nerves."

"That is just the point," cried Morton, "which I wished to bring you to. But if you affirm this, you must also, of necessity, grant something further; namely, that there is a medium by which the nerves act: they do not set themselves quivering. Pain, pleasure, &c., are influences from without; as the music on an instrument comes from the touch of the person playing, not from the wire, although it is the vibration of the wire which is the music."

"Certainly," said I.

"Well," said Morton, "observe how intangible and immaterial are the various influences which act upon the nerves, and how subtile must be the medium of communication. An unpleasant and disgusting sight turns you sick at the stomach; startling news or sudden grief makes the blood rush at once to the heart; a word from one beloved brings it tingling to the cheek; fear often suspends animation; hate, love, envy, wrath, hope, sorrow-all imma terial and non-physical things-affect the nerves physically. Is it not so?" "Certainly," I replied.

"Well, then, it being granted that such influences produce material and physical results, what influence can be more powerful than the presence of an intelligence, saturate as it were with anguish in the pangs of more than human suffering. some dark soul working out in pain its penal progress? Fancy, in dreams, brings images before the eye; may we not suppose such

a principle as powerful as fancy? And suppose, I say, that one of you were of a highly nervous, and mesmerically-susceptible temperament, is it not possible is it not at least possible that this agonised thought might establish a communication with your own, and send a nerve of the eye, quivering with emotion, to the brain? Here I am speaking, for example's sake, of an influence of dread and evil; but may not those of love and purity be equally powerful?"

"Well, granting all this," said the parson, with a dissatisfied look, “how shall we say that the Deity, for no apparent object or beneficial result, permits the dead thus heedlessly to terrify and scare the living?"

"Ah," said Morton, seriously, and bowing his head as he spoke, "how shall we explain the mystery and the riddle of all that is about us? - pain abundant, never ennobling, but often debasing; good choked by evil, light by darkness, often ; seeing this, do we the less humbly and hopefully believe that God is good, and that mercy and justice are above all ?"

We were all silent; nor did any one attempt to renew the conversation. At last the parson took his leave of us.

"What a pity," he said to me, speaking of Morton, as he was putting on his hat in the hall. "what a pity that so much thought should be wasted on idle and unsatisfying speculations! What a pity, sir, that a heart like Morton's, brimful of warm humanity, should be shrouded by so deep a melancholy from all communion with the world."

"Every heart knoweth its own sorrow," thought I, as I returned to the

It was now twilight. Morton was standing by the window, and looking down the garden.

"And if they sought to communicate with us, the dead," said he, "and we would not!"

"I doubt," said I, "if in the human mind the power of will be sufficiently strong to enable us to abstract ourselves into such a mental condition as to receive such communications, were they even possible, which I cannot believe."

"You do not know the force of will," said he, with a sudden energy in his voice and manner. "I will give you a proof of it."

I was dumb with surprise. Morton advanced into the centre of the room, extended one arm and waved it with a strange gesture in the air; I observed that he muttered something to himself, and that his eyes were intently fixed upon the door. Thither I turned my own glance, wild with interest. After some moments had elapsed, the door slowly opened, and But by Apollo, and all the laws of art; and by all chivalry, and the sacred reverence of fair women in all times, from the lovely Lacedæmonian, to you, yourself, dear lady, this incident deserves to be duly framed, and portrayed in another chapter.

O ivory-palaced, and amaranthdropping dreams! O fancies, sweet and strange, of poet and painter, in the blue summer midnights! O visions of eremite and seer in the antique solitudes of old! O pictures of Raphael! O songs of Petrarch! she was fairer than all of you.