I possessed, even as a child, an unusual share of what phrenologists call Concentrativeness.  The power of absorption, of self-forgetfulness, was at the same time a source of delight and a torment.  Lost in some wild dream or absurd childish speculation, my insensibility to outward things was chastised as carelessness or a hardened indifference to counsel.  With a memory almost marvellous to retain those things which appealed to my imagination, I blundered painfully over the commonest tasks.  While I frequently repeated the Sunday hymn, at dinner, I was too often unable to give the least report of the sermon.  Withdrawn into my corner of the pew, I gave myself up, after the enunciation of the text, to a complete abstraction, which took no note of time or place.  Fixing my eyes upon a knot in one of the panels under the pulpit, I sat moveless during the hour and a half which our worthy old clergyman required for the expounding of the seven parts of his discourse.  They could never accuse me of sleeping, however; for I rarely even winked.  The closing hymn recalled me to myself, always with a shock, or sense of pain, and sometimes even with a temporary nausea.

This habit of abstraction—­properly a complete passivity of the mind—­after a while developed another habit, in which I now see the root of that peculiar condition which made me a Medium.  I shall therefore endeavor to describe it.  I was sitting, one Sunday, just as the minister was commencing his sermon, with my eyes carelessly following the fingers of my right hand, as I drummed them slowly across my knee.  Suddenly, the wonder came into my mind,—­How is it my fingers move?  What set them going?  What is it that stops them?  The mystery of that communication between will and muscle, which no physiologist has ever fathomed, burst upon my young intellect.  I had been conscious of no intention of thus drumming my fingers; they were in motion when I first noticed them:  they were certainly a part of myself, yet they acted without my knowledge or design!  My left hand was quiet; why did its fingers not move also?  Following these reflections came a dreadful fear, as I remembered Jane, the blacksmith’s daughter, whose elbows and shoulders sometimes jerked in such a way as to make all the other scholars laugh, although we were sorry for the poor girl, who cried bitterly over her unfortunate, ungovernable limbs.  I was comforted, however, on finding that I could control the motion of my fingers at pleasure; but my imagination was too active to stop there.  What if I should forget how to direct my hands?  What if they should refuse to obey me?  What if my knees, which were just as still as the hymn-books in the rack before me, should cease to bend, and I should sit there forever?  These very questions seemed to produce a temporary paralysis of the will.  As my right hand lay quietly on my knee, and I asked myself, with a stupid wonder, “Now, can I move it?” it lay as still as before.  I had only questioned, not willed.