cities of America and Europe rose vividly before me.  In the long strata of solid gray clouds, where the sun had gone down, leaving only a few vapory gold-fishes swimming in the clear spaces above, I could fancy I saw the lonely Roman Campagna and the wondrous dome of St. Peter’s, as when first beheld on the horizon ten years ago.  Then, as from the slopes of San Miniato at sunset, gray, red-tiled Florence, with its Boboli gardens, full of nightingales, its old towers and cathedrals, and its soaring Giotto Campanile.  Then Genoa, with its terraces and marble palaces, and that huge statue of Andre Doria.  Then Naples, gleaming white in the eye of day over her pellucid depths of sea.  The golden days of Italy floated by me.  Then came the memories, glad or sad, of days that had passed in my own native land,—­in the very city that lay behind me,—­the intimate communings with dear friends,—­the musical and the merry nights,—­the trials, anxieties, sorrows——­

But all this is very egotistical and unnecessary.  I merely meant to say that I was in a peculiar, almost abnormal state of mind, that evening.  The spirit had, as it were, been drawn outwards, and perhaps slightly dislocated, by those mesmeric passes of my cousin, and I had not succeeded as yet in adjusting it quite satisfactorily in its old bodily grooves and sockets.  The condition I was in was not as pleasant as I could have wished; for I was as alive to painful remembrances and imaginations, as to pleasant ones.  I seemed to myself like a revolving lantern of a light-house,—­now dark, now glowing with a fiery radiance.

I asked myself, Is it that I have been blind and deaf and dull all my life, and am just waking into real existence? or am I developing into a medium,—­Heaven forbid!—­and the spirits pushing at some unguarded portal of the nervous system, and striving to take possession?  Shall I hear raps and knockings when I return to my solitary chamber, and sit a powerless beholder of damaged furniture, which the spirits will never have the conscience to promise payment for, when my landlady’s bill comes in? (By the way, have the spirits ever behaved like gentlemen in this respect, and settled up fair and square for the breakages they have indulged in by way of exemplifying the doctrine of a future state?)

As I soliloquized thus, I was attracted by a low vibrating note among the leaves.  Looking through them, I saw, for the first time, that two or three telegraph-wires, which I had observed skirting the road, ran directly through the tree in which I was seated.  It was a strange sort of sound, that came in hurried jerks, as it were, accompanied with a corresponding jerk of the wire.