troubled me very much.

I was dining at my cousin's Madame Sable, whose husband is colonel of
the 76th Chasseurs at Limoges. There were two young women there, one of
whom had married a medical man, Dr. Parent, who devotes himself a great
deal to nervous diseases and the extraordinary manifestations to which
at this moment experiments in hypnotism and suggestion give rise.

He related to us at some length, the enormous results obtained by
English scientists and the doctors of the medical school at Nancy, and
the facts which he adduced appeared to me so strange, that I declared
that I was altogether incredulous.

"We are," he declared, "on the point of discovering one of the most
important secrets of nature, I mean to say, one of its most important
secrets on this earth, for there are certainly some which are of a
different kind of importance up in the stars, yonder. Ever since man has
thought, since he has been able to express and write down his thoughts,
he has felt himself close to a mystery which is impenetrable to his
coarse and imperfect senses, and he endeavours to supplement the want of
power of his organs by the efforts of his intellect. As long as that
intellect still remained in its elementary stage, this intercourse with
invisible spirits assumed forms which were commonplace though
terrifying. Thence sprang the popular belief in the supernatural, the
legends of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, ghosts, I might
even say the legend of God, for our conceptions of the workman-creator,
from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the
most mediocre, the stupidest and the most unacceptable inventions that
ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creatures. Nothing is
truer than what Voltaire says: 'God made man in His own image, but man
has certainly paid Him back again.'

"But for rather more than a century, men seem to have had a presentiment
of something new. Mesmer and some others have put us on an unexpected
track, and especially within the last two or three years, we have
arrived at really surprising results."

My cousin, who is also very incredulous, smiled, and Dr. Parent said to
her: "Would you like me to try and send you to sleep, Madame?" "Yes,
certainly."

She sat down in an easy-chair, and he began to look at her fixedly, so
as to fascinate her. I suddenly felt myself somewhat uncomfortable, with
a beating heart and a choking feeling in my throat. I saw tha