, or ascend into air as a vapour. Thus is man susceptible of
three states of existence,--the animal, the mental, the spiritual; and
according as he is brought into relation or affinity with that occult
agency of the whole natural world, which we familiarly call heat, and
which no science has yet explained, which no scale can weigh, and no eye
discern, one or the other of these three states of being prevails, or is
subjected."

I still continued silent, for I was unwilling discourteously to say to a
stranger so much older than myself, that he seemed to me to reverse
all the maxims of the philosophy to which he made pretence, in founding
speculations audacious and abstruse upon unanalogous comparisons that
would have been fantastic even in a poet. And Sir Philip, after another
pause, resumed with a half smile,--

"After what I have said, it will perhaps not very much surprise you
when I add that but for my belief in the powers I ascribe to trance, we
should not be known to each other at this moment."

"How? Pray explain!"

"Certain circumstances, which I trust to relate to you in detail
hereafter, have imposed on me the duty to discover, and to bring human
laws to bear upon, a creature armed with terrible powers of evil. This
monster, for without metaphor, monster it is, not man like ourselves,
has, by arts superior to those of ordinary fugitives, however dexterous
in concealment, hitherto for years eluded my research. Through the
trance of an Arab child, who, in her waking state, never heard of his
existence, I have learned that this being is in England, is in L----. I
am here to encounter him. I expect to do so this very night, and under
this very roof."

"Sir Philip!"

"And if you wonder, as you well may, why I have been talking to you with
this startling unreserve, know that the same Arab child, on whom I thus
implicitly rely, informs me that your life is mixed up with that of the
being I seek to unmask and disarm,--to be destroyed by his arts or his
agents, or to combine in the causes by which the destroyer himself shall
be brought to destruction."

"My life!--your Arab child named me, Allen Fenwick?"

"My Arab child told me that the person in whom I should thus naturally
seek an ally was he who had saved the life of the man whom I then meant
for my heir, if I died unmarried and childless. She told me that I
should not be many hours in this town, which she described minutely,
before you would be made known