one calling her name, and knew not precisely in
what direction.

"Have you bewitched her?" I exclaimed.

"It is no sorcery of mine," said Zenobia; "but I have seen the girl do
that identical thing once or twice before. Can you imagine what is the
matter with her?"

"No; unless," said I, "she has the gift of hearing those 'airy tongues
that syllable men's names,' which Milton tells about."

From whatever cause, Priscilla's animation seemed entirely to have
deserted her. She seated herself on a rock, and remained there until
Hollingsworth came up; and when he took her hand and led her back to
us, she rather resembled my original image of the wan and spiritless
Priscilla than the flowery May-queen of a few moments ago. These
sudden transformations, only to be accounted for by an extreme nervous
susceptibility, always continued to characterize the girl, though with
diminished frequency as her health progressively grew more robust.

I was now on my legs again. My fit of illness had been an avenue
between two existences; the low-arched and darksome doorway, through
which I crept out of a life of old conventionalisms, on my hands and
knees, as it were, and gained admittance into the freer region that lay
beyond. In this respect, it was like death. And, as with death, too,
it was good to have gone through it. No otherwise could I have rid
myself of a thousand follies, fripperies, prejudices, habits, and other
such worldly dust as inevitably settles upon the crowd along the broad
highway, giving them all one sordid aspect before noon-time, however
freshly they may have begun their pilgrimage in the dewy morning. The
very substance upon my bones had not been fit to live with in any
better, truer, or more energetic mode than that to which I was
accustomed. So it was taken off me and flung aside, like any other
worn-out or unseasonable garment; and, after shivering a little while
in my skeleton, I began to be clothed anew, and much more
satisfactorily than in my previous suit. In literal and physical
truth, I was quite another man. I had a lively sense of the exultation
with which the spirit will enter on the next stage of its eternal
progress after leaving the heavy burden of its mortality in an early
grave, with as little concern for what may become of it as now affected
me for the flesh which I had lost.

Emerging into the genial sunshine, I half fancied that the labors of
the brotherhood had already realized