as four years old, the period of the first
accident.

When the husband and child were brought to her she knew them not, though
she had some vague notion of having seen them in her dream. The husband
prayed her to return to him: she said she was not his wife, and could
not accept him as a husband; that she felt no love for the child, and
could not even like it as a playmate. She recollected her parents when
they were twenty-two years of age, and could not understand how they
could be so much changed.

In all her occupations and amusements she acted as a young child, but
she gradually increased in understanding, and in sixteen years after her
recovery she became a most accomplished person, without, however,
possessing the varied talent of former times. She lived seventy-two
years after the trance (in all ninety-eight years) now a short life with
us; but never, till the day of her death, could she understand that she
had lived during the twenty-two years which filled up the space between
the first and second accidents. Strange to say, during that interval, no
one had suspected that her brain was affected. Nearly the whole period
had elapsed before the commencement of my rule, or the evil would have
been detected and remedied, not by confining the patient and driving her
into madness, but by gentle means.

The medical officers had no doubt of her complete re-establishment:
besides, shortly after her return to calmness they applied the tests
recently discovered, and the result furnished conclusive evidence that
the malady had been eradicated. On an examination after death there was
indeed, as the doctors thought, an unhealthy absence of certain
microscopic animalcula, the effects of whose continued presence in
excess in one portion of the brain to the detriment of others, lead to
madness. The substance of the brain was poor and watery, and it seemed
as though at other times there had been more brain than was then found;
the lining of the brain was coated with a substance in outward
appearance not unlike the fur which sometimes accumulates on the tongue
in a fever. The doctors had reason to believe that this fur was composed
of the remains of the insects which, probably, had been killed at the
time of the second accident, either by the shock or the fumes of the
boiling liquid, and it was to this accidental circumstance that they
were inclined to attribute the recovery of those parts of the brain
which had remained, as it