and circumstances, since you are a mere spirit, and have no knowledge of the bodily part of us.”  He answered, smiling, “You are mistaken, I have been one of you, and lived a month amongst you, which gives me an exact sense of your condition.  You are to know, that all who enter into human life, have a certain date or stamen given to their being, which they only who die of age may be said to have arrived at; but it is ordered sometimes by fate, that such as die infants, are after death to attend mankind to the end of that stamen of being in themselves, which was broke off by sickness or any other disaster.  These are proper guardians to men, as being sensible of the infirmity of their state.  You are philosopher enough to know, that the difference of men’s understanding proceeds only from the various dispositions of their organs; so that he who dies at a month old, is in the next life as knowing (though more innocent) as they who live to fifty; and after death, they have as perfect a memory and judgment of all that passed in their lifetime, as I have of all the revolutions in that uneasy, turbulent condition of yours; and, you’d say, I had enough of it in a month, were I to tell you all my misfortunes.”  “A life of a month, can’t have, one would think, much variety; but pray,” said I, “let us have your story.”

Then he proceeds in the following manner: 

“It was one of the most wealthy families in Great Britain into which I was born, and it was a very great happiness to me that it so happened, otherwise I had still, in all probability, been living:  but I shall recount to you all the occurrences of my short and miserable existence, just as, by examining into the traces made in my brain, they appeared to me at that time.  The first thing that ever struck my senses, was a noise over my head of one shrieking; after which, methought I took a full jump, and found myself in the hands of a sorceress, who seemed as if she had been long waking and employed in some incantation:  I was thoroughly frightened, and cried out, but she immediately seemed to go on in some magical operation, and anointed me from head to foot.  What they meant I could not imagine; for there gathered a great crowd about me, crying, ‘An heir, an heir’; upon which I grew a little still, and believed this was a ceremony to be used only to great persons, and such as made them, what they called, Heirs.  I lay very quiet; but the witch, for no manner of reason or provocation in the world, takes me and binds my head as hard as possibly she could, then ties up both my legs, and makes me swallow down a horrid mixture; I thought it a harsh entrance into life to begin with taking physic; but I was forced to it, or else must have taken down a great instrument in which she gave it me.  When I was thus dressed, I was carried to a bedside, where a fine young lady (my mother I wot) had like to have hugged me to death.  From her, they faced me about, and there was a thing with quite another look from the rest of the room, to whom