“She sleeps,” said Minoret, examining the woman, who seemed to him to belong to an inferior class.

“Her body is for the time being in abeyance,” said the Swedenborgian.  “Ignorant persons suppose that condition to be sleep.  But she will prove to you that there is a spiritual universe, and that the mind when there does not obey the laws of this material universe.  I will send her wherever you wish to go,—­a hundred miles from here or to China, as you will.  She will tell you what is happening there.”

“Send her to my house in Nemours, Rue des Bourgeois; that will do,” said Minoret.

He took Minoret’s hand, which the doctor let him take, and held it for a moment seeming to collect himself; then with his other hand he took that of the woman sitting in the arm-chair and placed the hand of the doctor in it, making a sign to the old sceptic to seat himself beside this oracle without a tripod.  Minoret observed a slight tremor on the absolutely calm features of the woman when their hands were thus united by the Swedenborgian, but the action, though marvelous in its effects, was very simply done.

“Obey him,” said the unknown personage, extending his hand above the head of the sleeping woman, who seemed to imbibe both light and life from him, “and remember that what you do for him will please me.—­You can now speak to her,” he added, addressing Minoret.

“Go to Nemours, to my house, Rue des Bourgeois,” said the doctor.

“Give her time; put your hand in hers until she proves to you by what she tells you that she is where you wish her to be,” said Bouvard to his old friend.

“I see a river,” said the woman in a feeble voice, seeming to look within herself with deep attention, notwithstanding her closed eyelids.  “I see a pretty garden—­”

“Why do you enter by the river and the garden?” said Minoret.

“Because they are there.”

“Who?”

“The young girl and her nurse, whom you are thinking of.”

“What is the garden like?” said Minoret.

“Entering by the steps which go down to the river, there is the right, a long brick gallery, in which I see books; it ends in a singular building,—­there are wooden bells, and a pattern of red eggs.  To the left, the wall is covered with climbing plants, wild grapes, Virginia jessamine.  In the middle is a sun-dial.  There are many plants in pots.  Your child is looking at the flowers.  She shows them to her nurse—­she is making holes in the earth with her trowel, and planting seeds.  The nurse is raking the path.  The young girl is pure as an angel, but the beginning of love is there, faint as the dawn—­”

“Love for whom?” asked the doctor, who, until now, would have listened to no word said to him by somnambulists.  He considered it all jugglery.

“You know nothing—­though you have lately been uneasy about her health,” answered the woman.  “Her heart has followed the dictates of nature.”