devine, become wonderfully divine, so that supernatural agencies wax less difficult to our imaginations; and while we are ten times more ready to meet a ghost, we are as many times more ready to admit their possibility.  But the end of these grand and elevated conditions is generally sleep and an ugly nightmare; and though my case was an exception as regards the latter, I awoke in not a very happy mood, just as Graeme entered the room and told me it was twelve o’clock.  As I rubbed my eyes, he sat down in his chair, and seemed inclined to court silence; but it was clear he could not achieve repose.

I felt no inclination to add to his apparent disturbance by any remarks on what I had seen; but it struck me as remarkable, that, while he got into contortions and general restlessness, putting his hand to his brow, throwing one leg over another, closing his hands, and heaving long sighs, he never so much as thought it worth his pains to ask my opinion of the scene in the wood.  It seemed as if he was so thoroughly convinced of a divine manifestation against him, that he despised any exceptional scepticism as utterly beneath his notice or attention—­thoroughly engrossed, as he appeared to be, with the terrible sanction of a portent of some coming retribution.  His silence in some degree distressed me, as I thought he resented my levity in commenting upon his convictions; so it was with some relief that Dr. Rogers came in and sat down at the table, apparently to wait for a call to the bedroom.  A man this of ostentatious gloom,—­too grave to deign to be witty, too sanctified to stoop to be cheerful, and therefore not the man I could have wished to see as the medical adviser, and perhaps the religious confidant, of my friend and his wife.  A temperate man, too, by his own confession, pronounced over the top of a bottle; and he drank as if for health, while his manner of beslabbering the glass with his thick lips indicated a contempt for its confined capacity; a tumbler would have suited him better; and he waxed apparently graver when the delightful aroma of the Bordeaux grape fondled his nostrils.  We got into supernaturals immediately, though how the subject was introduced I cannot remember; but Dr. Rogers was a grave and heavy advocate for divine manifestation, and Graeme’s ear, circumcised to delicacy, hung upon his thick lips.  I asked for instances beyond the domain of the addled brains of old women, or the excited fancies of young; and Graeme looked at me intently, without saying a word.

“I have seen hundreds die,” said the doctor, “ay, strong men, the tissues of whose brain were, in comparison of those of your old women and young enthusiasts, as iron wires to pellicles of flesh.  And how do they die if they are Christians, as all men ought to be?  What is there in death, think you, to subvert the known laws of physiology?  We might suppose, that as the spirit is about to leave the mortal frame, it will be fitful, and flit from