to. I have never seen him--that is
to say, with these eyes--and probably never may," she said, with a deep
sigh.

"Do I understand you to say that you have never seen this young man you
talk about, and yet you take so much interest in him?"

"Never with the eyes of the body," she replied.

"How, then?" I asked.

"With the eyes of the spirit."

"That is to say," I resumed, "that this young man named Charles is but a
creature of the imagination--that he has no real existence."

"Oh, pardon me," she replied; "decidedly he has an existence--a double
one. A bodily one, of which I know nothing; and a spiritual one, of
which I know more."

"How?" I asked. "You have never seen him in the flesh, but are yet
acquainted with his spirit. Does the spirit leave his body and appear to
you?"

"Precisely so."

"Oh! but these are hallucinations, my dear young lady," I said, "that
patients in your state of health are frequently subject to."

"No, doctor; say not so," she answered. "It is now more than a year
since, that in my dream, as I was walking alone in a beautiful garden, I
met a young man, also quite alone and reading. He was of extraordinary
personal beauty. He looked at me a moment and passed by. The very next
evening I had the same dream--there he was again. The dream was so very
vivid, that I could not believe it to be one of those ordinary dreams so
common to persons suffering from indigestion. There was such a reality
about the whole--the garden, the terraces, the old house--altogether had
too much truth about it to have been a dream."

"And what do you think it was, if not a dream?" I asked, smiling.

"Nothing less," she replied "than a glimpse into that world so zealously
guarded from our mortal eyes as to make us doubt of its existence, or,
at least, to hold it as something so ethereal and visionary that we
tremble even to speculate on it; but which, nevertheless, exists, has
existed, and will exist to all eternity in form as palpable as the earth
we this day inhabit."

I mused a little, then said, "Dreams are often very vivid; I know that
by experience, but upon waking I have always been able to account for
them in some way or other."

"Don't call this a dream of mine, doctor," she said. "In everything it
is most unlike the dreams of your experience. Those you allude to are
vivid only for one night, and disperse into air on waking. Such is not
the case with my dreams. The dream of each night to me is th