My cousin yielded to my request with alacrity;—­every subject for mesmerism was for him legitimate;—­and I relinquished myself to his passes with the docility of a man about to be shaved.

The passes from the head downward were kept up perseveringly for half an hour, without my experiencing any change, or manifesting the least symptom of drowsiness.  At last the charm began to work.  I began to be conscious of a singular trickling or creeping sensation following the motion of his passes down my arms.  My respiration grew short.  I experienced, however, no tendency to sleep, and my mind was perfectly calm and unexcited.  My cousin was satisfied with his experiment so far, but we both concluded it had better end here.  So he made the reverse passes, in order to undo the knot he was beginning to tie in my nerves.  He did not, however, entirely succeed in untying it.  I was a healthy subject, and the magnetism continued to affect my nerves, in spite of the untangling passes.

Soon after, I rose and took my leave.  I was strangely excited, but it was a purely physical, and not a mental excitement.  Thinking that a walk would quiet me, I went through street after street, until I reached the outskirts of the city.  It was a mild September evening.  The fine weather and the sight of the trees and fields tempted me to continue my walk.  It was near sunset, and I strolled on and on, watching the purple gray and ruddy gold of the clouds, until I had got fairly into the country.

As I rambled on, I was suddenly seized with a fancy to climb a tree which stood by the roadside, and rest myself in a convenient notch which I observed between two of the limbs.  I was soon seated in among the branches, with a canopy of leaves around and over me,—­feeling, in my still nervous condition, as I leaned my back against the mossy bark, like a magnified tree-toad in clothes.

The air was balmy and fragrant, and against the amber of the western sky rose and fell numberless little clouds of insects.  The birds were chirping and fluttering about me, and made their arrangements for their night’s lodging, in manifest dread of the clothed tree-toad who had invaded their leafy premises.

The peculiar nervousness which had taken possession of me was now passing off, to be replaced by a species of mental exaltation.  I was becoming conscious of something approaching semi-clairvoyance, and yet not in the ordinary form.  Sensation, emotion, thought were intensified.  The landscape around me was dotted with farm-houses, pillowed in soft, dark clumps of trees.  One by one, the lights began to appear at the windows,—­soft rising stars of home-joys.  The glorious September sunset was fading, but still resplendent in the west.  The landscape was pervaded with a deeper repose, the glowing clouds with a diviner splendor than that which filled the eye.  Then thronging memories awoke.  My remembrances of all my past life in the crowded