There was, at that time, a day of weary staging after leaving the cars, before arriving in the village of X——­; there were also six rough miles of carriage-conveyance before the traveller could attain the old house by the damp river-marsh whereto I was destined.  When I arrived there, Vannelle stood at the door to greet me.

“We have six months’ concern together,” he said, as if delivering himself of some studied speech,—­“we have six months’ concern together; then we may stand at the parting of the ways,—­we may cleave to one another, or separate forever.”

A low, dark house.  The south-side planted out from the sun by pines and cedars.  The parlors covered with well-worn Turkey carpets, chafed into dusty ridges.  The wretched window-glass breaking and distorting the pine-trees without.  Little oval mirrors distorting the human countenance within.  In the living-room (so called by those able to live in it) loomed a rusty air-tight stove of cathedral proportion,—­a ghastly altar which the bitterest enemy of the family might feel fully justified in protecting.  A square, cellarless room, about twenty feet from the house, had been the study of the elder Vannelle.  Tables covered with a confused mass of writing-materials.  A jumble of retorts and other chemical apparatus about the floor.  Cabinets of the ugliest pattern reached to the ceiling;—­at first I supposed them to be made of painted wood; afterwards I discovered they were of iron, and filled with rare books and manuscripts.

“My father built this study,” said Vannelle, as we passed into it.  “He wished to get rid of those periodical clearings-up from which there is no escape in a New-England household.  Mrs. Brett, the wife of our farmer, could never resist the feminine itch to put things to rights.  She was always contriving to arrange papers and books in symmetrical piles where nothing could be found.  My father could never turn his back but she was sure to annihilate important scraps of writing that were lying about the floor, and, under pretence of sweeping, invoke a simoom of dust that hours were insufficient to allay.  But when he built this room, and kept the key of it, there was no more trouble.”

I shudder as I hurry through these descriptions, for a confession which I hardly dare to put into words must accompany them.  All these surroundings, seen by me for the first time, had a fearful familiarity.  In some occult state of spiritual existence I seemed to have known them all.  I have learned that the soul may enter into communion with other minds otherwise than through the senses,—­nay, more, it may thus take an inexplicable cognizance of material things.  Of this I have had such proof as it would be infatuation to doubt.  I was compelled to test this startling suspicion for the first time.