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."

"There," cried Morton, pettishly, "there you are with your evidence of the senses, that vague cant.

If you

take your ground upon these, Bishop Berkeley has already destroyed the world for you. Now, I ask you to define me sight. You will answer-will

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."

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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 immaterial and non-physical things-affect the nerves physically. Is it not so?" Certainly," I replied.

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"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

dining-room; "and God's wisdom is wiser than ours."

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.

WHITE, statue-like, a pause of beauty in the door-way, and then she glided into the room as noisless as the shadow of a cloud over deep flowers! I knew the face; I knew the violet eyes; I knew the pensive lips! If that stately picture in the gallery had stepped out of its ebony frame, and glided down the glimmering stairway in the twilight, while the Madonnas, and the Magdelenes were staring dumb wonder at it from the walls, and had touched me by the hand, and spoken to me with a human voice, I should not have

been more awe-stricken. The sum of all sensation seemed full, gazing at that white face, superbly silent. How my heart beat, when the lips moved!

"You called me," she said: 66 see, I am come !" Then the head drooped, and she stood, like a statue from which an oracle had gone forth.

"I wish you to know my friend," said Morton, in a low voice; and he placed her hand in mine.

I confess that a thrill of strangest sensation ran through me, as I felt that light hand resting in my own. Then I

Ir is now sixty years since Bryan Edwards apologised for the publication of his "History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies," on the grounds that his fellowsubjects in the old country were at the time in a state of gross ignorance in regard to the circumstances of those important dominions of the crown of England. In those days "ships, colonies, and commerce was a charter toast at every convivial meeting of bold Britons, and the West Indies (according to the testimony of their historian) had "become the principal source of the national opulence and maritime power;" yet Edwards "had not met with any book that even pretends to furnish a comprehensive and satisfactory account of the origin and progress of our national settlements in the tropical parts of America.

The system of agriculture (he continues) practised in the West Indies is almost as much unknown to the people of Great Britain as that of Japan. They know, indeed, that sago, indigo, and cotton are raised and produced there; but they are very generally, and to a surprising degree, uninformed concern. ing the method by which these and other valuable commodities are cultivated and brought to perfection." Whether the attempt made to dispel this darkness was followed by the success it deserved, we need not now pause to inquire. The ability and enlightened spirit of patriotism which distinguish the "History were, at all events, rewarded by the speedy sale of two editions, and by its establishment as a standard national work, so firmly that it retains its authority but little diminished even at the present day. It is quite certain, however, that even though our grandsires may have walked safely in the light reflected by Bryan Edwards, the cloud has again descended upon our path. If a comprehensive and satisfactory knowledge

*

of the origin, progress, and condition of our West Indian settlements ever generally existed in the public mind of England, it has been obliterated, and the excuse of novelty to most readers as fully justifies the publication, in 1854, of the work of Dr. Davy, the title of which we give below, as it did that of Edwards, in 1793. But, in the interval of half a century, a marvellous change has been suffered by the subject of the labours of these authors. West Indian opulence has vanished like the visionary grandeur of Alnaschar; the idea of a planter, once brilliant in the imagination of every youthful adventurer, has lost its halo of gold and parliamentary honours, and exists. but as a tradition of the past. No trace of the sugar-lords of Bristol and Glasgow remains even in a fossil state. Those islands of the Caribbean sea, "surpassing all the rest of the world in beauty and conveniency," an adequate idea of whose charms Columbus despaired of conveying to his royal master-are now well-nigh forgotten by the world; the very groans of the plantations" have died away upon the air. Nevertheless, we do not altogether despair of interesting our readers, so far as to induce them to accompany us willingly in a rapid sketch of some of the more remarkable circumstances that distinguish the past and passing history of the British West Indies, and render it a worthy subject of study to all who desire to comprehend the principles, good and bad, which have governed the development of the most important of our national relations, social, commercial and political. In little more than two centuries, these colonies have passed through the several stages of the life of a nation. By the light of history, as authentic and fresh as if it were set forth in the newspapers of the days in which we live, we can trace the growth of British institutions from infancy to maturity, watch their de

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