ll mere charlatanry and
deception--Lothair was having himself mesmerized!"

Cyprian and Theodore laughed heartily over this rather grotesque
picture.

"Pray don't talk of such things," said Lothair. "Man, by virtue of his
wonderful organization, is, alas! such a feeble creature the physical
element in him has such an injurious influence on the psychical that
every illness, every abnormal condition, awakens an alarm and anxiety
in him which, being a temporary insanity, causes him to do the most
extraordinary things. Plenty of clever and rational men, when they have
thought their doctors' prescriptions were not working as they expected
them to do, have had recourse to old women's nostrums, or 'sympathetic
media,' and I don't know what all. That I, at the time in question,
when my nerves were all out of order, inclined to Mesmerism, is a proof
of my weakness, but not of anything else."

"I," said Cyprian, "must beg you to allow me rather to believe that the
doubts respecting Mesmerism which you have expressed to-night are only
the results of some passing mental mood of the moment. What is
Mesmerism, considered as to its curative effects, but the concentrated,
increased, potentiated power of man's psychical element, empowered, by
being thus concentrated and augmented, thoroughly to control the
physical element; to know it, see it, and understand it through and
through; to detect the minutest abnormal condition in it, and, by the
very knowledge and perception of any such abnormal condition, to remove
it? It is not possible that you can deny this power of our psychical
element, or close your ears to the marvellous chords which come toning
into us, and pass toning out from us--mysterious 'music of the
spheres,'--the grand, unchangeable principle of Nature herself."

"You are talking in your usual strain," answered Lothair, "revelling in
your mystic dreams as you always do. I admit at once that Mesmerism,
stretching, as it undoubtedly does, into the domain of the ghostly,
must always exercise a powerful attraction on poetic temperaments. I
myself cannot deny that this mysterious subject has always penetrated
to the very depths of my soul. But listen while I make my confession of
faith in a few words. Who can penetrate, with foolhardy presumption,
into the deepest mysteries of Nature? Who can understand, or even
conjecture, with any sort of clearness, the nature of the mysterious
bond which unites soul and body, and, in cons