d the picture over the fireplace, and some
reference of hers to the immortelles in which it was framed, turned the
conversation upon the subject that Miss Ludington and she had been
discussing in the school-house.

Mrs. Slater, whose conversation showed her to be a woman of no great
culture, but unusual force of character and intelligence, expressed
herself as interested in the idea of the immortality of past selves, but
decidedly sceptical. Paul grew eloquent in maintaining its truth and
reasonableness, and, indeed, that it was the only intelligible theory of
immortality that was possible. The idea that the same soul successively
animated infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, and maturity, was, he
argued, but a modification of the curious East Indian dream of
metempsychosis, according to which every soul is supposed to inhabit in
turn innumerable bodies.

"You almost persuade me," said Mrs. Slater, at last. "But I never heard
of the spirit of anybody's past self appearing to them. If there are such
spirits, why have they never manifested themselves? Nobody every heard of
the spirit of one's past self appearing at a spiritualist seance, for
instance."

"There is one evidence among others," replied Paul. "that spiritualism is
a fraud. The mediums merely follow the vulgar superstition in the kind of
spirits that they claim to produce."

"Very likely you are right," said Mrs. Slater. "In fact, I presume you
are quite right. And yet, if I really believed as you do, do you know
what I would do? I would go to some of the spirit mediums over in New
York, of whom the papers are giving such wonderful accounts, and let them
try to materialize for me the spirit of my youth. Probably they couldn't
do it, but possibly they might; and a mighty little sight, Mr. De Riemer,
is more convincing than all the belief in the world. If I could see the
spirit of my youth face to face, I should believe that it had a separate
existence from my own. Otherwise, I don't believe I ever could."

"But the mediums are a set of humbugs!" exclaimed Paul; and then he
added, "I beg your pardon. Perhaps you are a spiritualist?"

"You need not beg my pardon," said Mrs. Slater, good-humouredly. "I am
not a spiritualist beyond thinking--and that is only lately--that there
may possibly be something in it, after all. Perhaps there may be, for
example, one part of truth to a hundred parts of fraud. I really don't
believe there is more. Now, as you think the m