ailor, 'is called _the prison-house of
flesh_, and the reason you are here is that you belong to "our sort."'

"I groaned, and followed the jailor, who led me below into some horrid
cell, where the daylight scarce entered. He turned the key upon me and I
awoke."

"Dear me," said I, "that was a very disagreeable dream. There was
nothing about Miss Edith in that," I said, smiling wickedly.

"No," he said, savagely, "and whose face do you think the jailor's was
in my dream?"

"I have no idea," I replied.

"Why, _yours_, doctor!" said the young man, suddenly starting up with
extreme energy, and darting a look of ferocity towards me.

"Yes, doctor, you are my jailor; it is you who have closed my spirit up
in its prison-house of flesh, so that it can no longer soar together in
the company of the higher intelligences. It is you who have driven me
back again to earth and made me an equal of such minds as your own.
_You_ have robbed me of the only woman I ever loved in my life,
_you_----"

"Stay, young man, one moment," I said, "and calm yourself. Is this your
gratitude for the relic I brought you yesterday? If I, as you say, have
robbed you of one of your lives, don't I offer you another which to a
young man of your age and position is a state of existence that I can't
say how many would _envy_, and which, after all, is doing nothing more
than my duty as a medical man. Then, as to robbing you of the lady you
love, haven't I the power of making you acquainted with her some day in
the flesh, if all goes well, and I succeeded in curing you both?"

"If such a meeting should take place, do you think," he said, "that we
should experience in the same intense degree those chaste joys of love,
as if we were in the spirit, when our souls, unfettered from any
particle of clay, are raised to that sublime pitch that we are enabled
to understand the profound and lofty discourse of angels and become
ourselves for the time a part of the heavenly bodies?"

"My dear young man," I observed, "life is short. If the paradise you are
in the habit of entering in your dreams be indeed that place where all
good souls hope to go after death, you have but to wait for a few
years----"

"Wait a few years!" he exclaimed, impatiently, "when every minute spent
away from _her_ appears a century! It's very plain _you_ are not in
love."

"In the meantime," I said, "content yourself with a life of flesh like
any other rational mortal."

He began to