“I tell you I have seen my boy, and that I know he lives,—­not in any far-off sphere beyond the grave, but here on earth, among living men!  Twice since his loss I have returned from England to seek him, in obedience to the vision, but in vain, and I have gone back home to dream the same dream.  But—­only last week—­I heard a wonderful story.  It was told me by a friend who is a great traveler, and who has but just returned from a lengthened tour in the south.  I met him at my club, `by accident,’ as unthinking persons say.  He told me that there exists, buried away out of common sight and knowledge, in the bosom of the Swiss Alps, a little village whose inhabitants possess, in varying degrees, a marvellous and priceless faculty.  Almost all the dwellers in this village are mutually related, either bearing the same ancestral name, or being branches from one original stock.  The founder of this community was a blind man, who, by some unexplained good fortune, acquired or became endowed with the psychic faculty called ‘second sight,’ or clairvoyance.  This faculty, it appears, is now the hereditary property of the whole village, more developed in the blind man’s immediate heirs than in his remoter relatives; but, strange to say, it is a faculty which, for a reason connected with the history of its acquirement, they enjoy only once a year, and that is on Christmas Eve.  I know well,” continued Mr. St. Aubyn, “all you have it in your mind to say.  Doubtless, you would hint to me that the narrator of the tale was amusing himself with my credulity; or that these Alpine villagers, if they exist, are not clairvoyants, but charlatans trading on the folly of the curious, or even that the whole story is a chimera of my own dreaming brain.  I am willing that, if it please you, you should accept any of these hypotheses.  As for me, in my sorrow and despair, I am resolved to leave no means untried to recover my boy; and it happens that the village in question is not far from the scene of the disaster which deprived me of him.  A strange hope—­a confidence even—­grows in my heart as I approach the end of my journey.  I believe I am about to verify the truth of my friend’s story, and that, through the wonderful faculty possessed by these Alpine peasants, the promise of my visions will be realised.”

His voice broke again, he ceased speaking, and turned his face away from me.  I was greatly moved, and anxious to impress him with a belief in the sincerity of my sympathy, and in my readiness to accept the truth of the tale he had repeated.

“Do not think,” I said with some warmth, “that I am disposed to make light of what you tell me, strange though it sounds.  Out in the West, where I come from, I heard, when a boy, many a story at least as curious as yours.  In our wild country, odd things chance at times, and queer circumstances, they say, happen in out of the way tracks in forest and prairie; aye, and there are strange