he household there remained after the death of
the master and mistress only old David, who, in spite of his eighty-two
years, suffices to wait on his mistress. Some of our Jarvis people tell
wonderful tales about her. These have a certain weight in a land so
essentially conducive to mystery as ours; and I am now studying the
treatise on Incantations by Jean Wier and other works relating to
demonology, where pretended supernatural events are recorded, hoping to
find facts analogous to those which are attributed to her."

"Then you do not believe in her?" said Wilfrid.

"Oh yes, I do," said the pastor, genially, "I think her a very
capricious girl; a little spoilt by her parents, who turned her head
with the religious ideas I have just revealed to you."

Minna shook her head in a way that gently expressed contradiction.

"Poor girl!" continued the old man, "her parents bequeathed to her that
fatal exaltation of soul which misleads mystics and renders them all
more or less mad. She subjects herself to fasts which horrify poor
David. The good old man is like a sensitive plant which quivers at the
slightest breeze, and glows under the first sun-ray. His mistress, whose
incomprehensible language has become his, is the breeze and the sun-ray
to him; in his eyes her feet are diamonds and her brow is strewn with
stars; she walks environed with a white and luminous atmosphere; her
voice is accompanied by music; she has the gift of rendering herself
invisible. If you ask to see her, he will tell you she has gone to the
_astral regions_. It is difficult to believe such a story, is it not?
You know all miracles bear more or less resemblance to the story of the
Golden Tooth. We have our golden tooth in Jarvis, that is all. Duncker
the fisherman asserts that he has seen her plunge into the fiord and
come up in the shape of an eider-duck, at other times walking on the
billows of a storm. Fergus, who leads the flocks to the saeters, says
that in rainy weather a circle of clear sky can be seen over the Swedish
castle; and that the heavens are always blue above Seraphita's head when
she is on the mountain. Many women hear the tones of a mighty organ when
Seraphita enters the church, and ask their neighbors earnestly if they
too do not hear them. But my daughter, for whom during the last two
years Seraphita has shown much affection, has never heard this music,
and has never perceived the heavenly perfumes which, they say, make the
air f