“I must confess,” answered his companion, “that there is something else which still holds me here, which I should be very sorry to leave the house without seeing cleared up or in some way explained.  You were too busy yourself yesterday when we were in the park with the camera, in looking for spots where you could make your sketches, to have observed anything else which was passing.  You left the broad walk, you remember, and went to a sequestered place on the side of the lake.  There was a fine view of the opposite shore which you wished to take.  Well, Ottilie, who was with us, got up to follow; and then proposed that she and I should find our way to you in the boat.  I got in with her, and was delighted with the skill of my fair conductress.  I assured her that never since I had been in Switzerland, where the young ladies so often fill the place of the boatmen, had I been so pleasantly ferried over the water.  At the same time I could not help asking her why she had shown such an objection to going the way which you had gone, along the little by-path.  I had observed her shrink from it with a sort of painful uneasiness.  She was not at all offended.  ’If you will promise not to laugh at me,’ she answered, ’I will tell you as much as I know about it; but to myself it is a mystery which I cannot explain.  There is a particular spot in that path which I never pass without a strange shiver passing over me, which I do not remember ever feeling anywhere else, and which I cannot the least understand.  But I shrink from exposing myself to the sensation, because it is followed immediately after by a pain on the left side of my head, from which at other times I suffer severely.’  We landed.  Ottilie was engaged with you, and I took the opportunity of examining the spot, which she pointed out to me as we went by on the water.  I was not a little surprised to find there distinct traces of coal in sufficient quantities to convince me that at a short distance below the surface there must be a considerable bed of it.

“Pardon me, my Lord; I see you smile; and I know very well that you have no faith in these things about which I am so eager, and that it is only your sense and your kindness which enable you to tolerate me.  However, it is impossible for me to leave this place without trying on that beautiful creature an experiment with the pendulum.”

The Earl, whenever these matters came to be spoken of, never failed to repeat the same objections to them over and over again; and his friend endured them all quietly and patiently, remaining firm, nevertheless, to his own opinion, and holding to his own wishes.  He, too, again repeated that there was no reason, because the experiment did not succeed with every one, that they should give them up, as if there was nothing in them but fancy.  They should be examined into all the more earnestly and scrupulously; and there was no doubt that the result would be the discovery of a number of affinities of inorganic creatures for one another, and of organic creatures for them, and again for each other, which at present were unknown to us.