ss has not been due to any vigorous exercise of
virtue on my part, but solely to the existence of that cool, reflective
reason which lay _perdue_ beneath all the extravagances of my mind.

I possessed, even as a child, an unusual share of what phrenologists
call Concentrativeness. The power of absorption, of self-forgetfulness,
was at the same time a source of delight and a torment. Lost in some
wild dream or absurd childish speculation, my insensibility to outward
things was chastised as carelessness or a hardened indifference to
counsel. With a memory almost marvellous to retain those things which
appealed to my imagination, I blundered painfully over the commonest
tasks. While I frequently repeated the Sunday hymn, at dinner, I was too
often unable to give the least report of the sermon. Withdrawn into my
corner of the pew, I gave myself up, after the enunciation of the text,
to a complete abstraction, which took no note of time or place. Fixing
my eyes upon a knot in one of the panels under the pulpit, I sat
moveless during the hour and a half which our worthy old clergyman
required for the expounding of the seven parts of his discourse. They
could never accuse me of sleeping, however; for I rarely even winked.
The closing hymn recalled me to myself, always with a shock, or sense of
pain, and sometimes even with a temporary nausea.

This habit of abstraction--properly a complete _passivity_ of the
mind--after a while developed another habit, in which I now see the root
of that peculiar condition which made me a Medium. I shall therefore
endeavor to describe it. I was sitting, one Sunday, just as the minister
was commencing his sermon, with my eyes carelessly following the fingers
of my right hand, as I drummed them slowly across my knee. Suddenly, the
wonder came into my mind,--How is it my fingers move? What set them
going? What is it that stops them? The mystery of that communication
between will and muscle, which no physiologist has ever fathomed, burst
upon my young intellect. I had been conscious of no intention of thus
drumming my fingers; they were in motion when I first noticed them: they
were certainly a part of myself, yet they acted without my knowledge or
design! My left hand was quiet; why did its fingers not move also?
Following these reflections came a dreadful fear, as I remembered Jane,
the blacksmith's daughter, whose elbows and shoulders sometimes jerked
in such a way as to make all the other scho