and Keats's "Lamia"? If so, can you understand them, or find any
physiological foundation for the story of either?

There is another set of questions of a different nature I should like to
ask, but it is hardly fair to put so many on a single sheet. There
is one, however, you must answer. Do you think there may be
predispositions, inherited or ingrafted, but at any rate constitutional,
which shall take out certain apparently voluntary determinations
from the control of the will, and leave them as free from moral
responsibility as the instincts of the lower animals? Do you not think
there may be a _crime_ which is not a _sin_?

Pardon me, my dear Sir, for troubling you with such a list of notes of
interrogation. There are some _very strange_ things going on here in
this place, country-town as it is. Country-life is apt to be dull; but
when it once gets going, it beats the city hollow, because it gives its
whole mind to what it is about. These rural sinners make terrible work
with the middle of the Decalogue, when they get started. However, I hope
I shall live through my year's school-keeping without catastrophes,
though there are queer doings about me which puzzle me and might scare
some people. If anything _should_ happen, you will be one of the first
to hear of it, no doubt. But I trust not to help out the editors of the
"Rockland Weekly Universe" with an obituary of the late lamented, who
signed himself in life

Your friend and pupil,

BERNARD C. LANGDON.

_The Professor to Mr. Langdon._

MY DEAR MR. LANGDON,--

I do not wonder that you find no answer from your country friends to the
curious questions you put. They belong to that middle region between
science and poetry which sensible men, as they are called, are very shy
of meddling with. Some people think that truth and gold are always to be
washed for; but the wiser sort are of opinion, that, unless there are so
many grains to the peck of sand or nonsense respectively, it does not
pay to wash for either, as long as one can find anything else to do. I
don't doubt there is some truth in the phenomena of animal magnetism,
for instance; but when you ask me to cradle for it, I tell you that
the hysteric girls cheat so, and the professionals are such a set of
pickpockets, that I can do something better than hunt for the grains of
truth among their tricks and lies. Do you remember what I used to say in
my lectures?--or were you asleep just then, or cutting your