organ might have been turned upside down
without affecting its expression. His forehead, however, was high and
thinly covered with sandy hair. I should have said, as a phrenologist,
Will feeble,--emotional, but not passionate,--likely to be enthusiast,
or weakly bigot.

I caught enough of what passed to make me call to the sergeant when the
chaplain left him.

"Good morning," said he. "How do you get on?"

"Not at all," I replied. "Where were you hit?"

"O, at Chancellorsville. I was shot in the shoulder. I have what the
doctors call paralysis of the median nerve, but I guess Dr. Neek and the
lightnin' battery will fix it in time. When my time's out I'll go back
to Kearsage and try on the school-teaching again. I was a fool to leave
it."

"Well," said I, "you're better off than I."

"Yes," he answered, "in more ways than one. I belong to the New Church.
It's a great comfort for a plain man like me, when he's weary and sick,
to be able to turn away from earthly things, and hold converse daily
with the great and good who have left the world. We have a circle in
Coates Street. If it wa'n't for the comfort I get there, I should have
wished myself dead many a time. I ain't got kith or kin on earth; but
this matters little, when one can talk to them daily, and know that they
are in the spheres above us."

"It must be a great comfort," I replied, "if only one could believe it."

"Believe!" he repeated, "how can you help it? Do you suppose anything
dies?"

"No," I said. "The soul does not, I am sure; and as to matter, it merely
changes form."

"But why then," said he, "should not the dead soul talk to the living.
In space, no doubt, exist all forms of matter, merely in finer, more
ethereal being. You can't suppose a naked soul moving about without a
bodily garment. No creed teaches that, and if its new clothing be of
like substance to ours, only of ethereal fineness,--a more delicate
recrystallization about the eternal spiritual nucleus,--must not it then
possess powers as much more delicate and refined as is the new material
in which it is reclad?"

"Not very clear," I answered; "but after all, the thing should be
susceptible of some form of proof to our present senses."

"And so it is," said he. "Come to-morrow with me, and you shall see and
hear for yourself."

"I will," said I, "if the doctor will lend me the ambulance."

It was so arranged, as the surgeon in charge was kind enough, as usual,
to oblige m