his mind) projected from his own, perhaps, so as to be a subject of contemplation to his bodily eyes.  Or, what was more likely, the soul itself of Annie Peyton might have left her body for a time in a dream.  It was among the possibilities, though he had never before believed it to be.  But then, again, how could his soul go off on an exploring tour with Annie’s?  His soul was safe in his body, and that, namely, the body, lying on the sofa,—­the room close, the window down.  Just then, he glanced toward the window, and remembered that he had not fastened it at all.  There was room enough for a soul to pass easily.  But then, again, how was his soul to pass,—­to get out, in the first place, of his body?  Easily enough.  The concentrated effort of will, which could give shape to a fancy, and place it outside the eye, could, by sustained action, separate all the perceptive powers from the senses,—­in short, the spirit from its envelope.

“To know, to perceive, to suffer, to rejoice, do not require skin and bones.  The heart weeps while the eye is dry; the lips smile while the heart is breaking.  One might have a conventional soul,—­to keep house, as it were, and do all the honors of society, while the real one went abroad to regions of truth and beauty, and bathed in living waters!”

While Fred continued so to think and speculate, and also to separate, and, as it were, classify his ideas, he was pleased to perceive, that, without any very strong volition on his part, but only from the analytical processes of his reason, that portion of his mind which perceived and enjoyed the truth of things became condensed and separated from the conventional, the factitious, and the merely sensual.  The qualities, or states, or whatever the metaphysician calls them, fell off him, as garments do in a dream, and left himself, his very self, separate, and a little distant, from his body.  He perceived this rather than saw it.  He knew it, but could not assert it.  The body, with its bodily wants and limitations, leaned on the couch, half slumberously; while the mind, himself, full of vague aspirations, keen intellectual hunger, and overlaid with error, obstinacy, and the thick crust of self-contemplation, which stifles all true progress,—­these assimilated qualities made himself, what he felt he was, not an attractive object to himself more than to anybody else.  All his perceptions pointed inward, and cramped and narrowed his existence.  He felt very, very small.

“This is strange,” he reasoned, “that I should have such a sense of contraction!  I crowd on myself, as it were.  My thoughts hit me, press me, instead of elevating me.  I cannot see why; for the habit of looking up to no goodness or intelligence but the Supreme must surely be a good one, and self-education and development the noblest process for a human being.”

He said this in a mechanical sort of way, as if it were a lesson he remembered at school.  But it made no impression on him, and did not relieve his difficulty.  He knew it, somehow, to be false, and felt it falling off as he spoke, as if it were the last remnant of gauzy sophistry.