When the husband and child were brought to her she knew them not, though she had some vague notion of having seen them in her dream.  The husband prayed her to return to him:  she said she was not his wife, and could not accept him as a husband; that she felt no love for the child, and could not even like it as a playmate.  She recollected her parents when they were twenty-two years of age, and could not understand how they could be so much changed.

In all her occupations and amusements she acted as a young child, but she gradually increased in understanding, and in sixteen years after her recovery she became a most accomplished person, without, however, possessing the varied talent of former times.  She lived seventy-two years after the trance (in all ninety-eight years) now a short life with us; but never, till the day of her death, could she understand that she had lived during the twenty-two years which filled up the space between the first and second accidents.  Strange to say, during that interval, no one had suspected that her brain was affected.  Nearly the whole period had elapsed before the commencement of my rule, or the evil would have been detected and remedied, not by confining the patient and driving her into madness, but by gentle means.

The medical officers had no doubt of her complete re-establishment:  besides, shortly after her return to calmness they applied the tests recently discovered, and the result furnished conclusive evidence that the malady had been eradicated.  On an examination after death there was indeed, as the doctors thought, an unhealthy absence of certain microscopic animalcula, the effects of whose continued presence in excess in one portion of the brain to the detriment of others, lead to madness.  The substance of the brain was poor and watery, and it seemed as though at other times there had been more brain than was then found; the lining of the brain was coated with a substance in outward appearance not unlike the fur which sometimes accumulates on the tongue in a fever.  The doctors had reason to believe that this fur was composed of the remains of the insects which, probably, had been killed at the time of the second accident, either by the shock or the fumes of the boiling liquid, and it was to this accidental circumstance that they were inclined to attribute the recovery of those parts of the brain which had remained, as it were, slumbering since the first accident.

XXIX.

THE LITTLE GOATHERD.

     “The flower is hidden until the electricities of the sun and light
     draw it forth into life and beauty.”

In speaking of the “choice of a husband,” I referred to the only case I recollected where the lady’s hesitation rendered a third meeting necessary.  The exception was interesting.