ernal ages,--only to
build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in,
and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse
beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning
picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil
destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there. I
do not speak wildly. I have just such a house in my mind's eye!"

"Then, sir," said the old gentleman, getting anxious to drop the
subject, "you are not to blame for leaving it."

"Within the lifetime of the child already born," Clifford went on, "all
this will be done away. The world is growing too ethereal and
spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer. To me,
though, for a considerable period of time, I have lived chiefly in
retirement, and know less of such things than most men,--even to me,
the harbingers of a better era are unmistakable. Mesmerism, now! Will
that effect nothing, think you, towards purging away the grossness out
of human life?"

"All a humbug!" growled the old gentleman.

"These rapping spirits, that little Phoebe told us of, the other day,"
said Clifford,--"what are these but the messengers of the spiritual
world, knocking at the door of substance? And it shall be flung wide
open!"

"A humbug, again!" cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy
at these glimpses of Clifford's metaphysics. "I should like to rap
with a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts who circulate such
nonsense!"

"Then there is electricity,--the demon, the angel, the mighty physical
power, the all-pervading intelligence!" exclaimed Clifford. "Is that a
humbug, too? Is it a fact--or have I dreamt it--that, by means of
electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating
thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round
globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall
we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the
substance which we deemed it!"

"If you mean the telegraph," said the old gentleman, glancing his eye
toward its wire, alongside the rail-track, "it is an excellent
thing,--that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics
don't get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly
as regards the detection of bank-robbers and murderers."

"I don't quite like it, in that point of view," replied Clifford. "A
bank-r