y interest in this child was increased and deepened by my saddened and
not wholly unremorseful remembrance of the night on which her sobs had
pierced my ear,--the night from which I secretly dated the mysterious
agencies that had wrenched from their proper field and career both my
mind and my life. But a gentler interest endeared her to my thoughts
in the pleasure that Lilian felt in her visits, in the affectionate
intercourse that sprang up between the afflicted sufferer and the
harmless infant. Often when we failed to comprehend some meaning
which Lilian evidently wished to convey to us--we, her mother and her
husband--she was understood with as much ease by Amy, the unlettered
child, as by Faber, the gray-haired thinker.

"How is it,--how is it?" I asked, impatiently and jealously, of Faber.
"Love is said to interpret where wisdom fails, and you yourself talk
of the marvels which sympathy may effect between lover and beloved; yet
when, for days together, I cannot succeed in unravelling Lilian's wish
or her thought--and her own mother is equally in fault--you or
Amy, closeted alone with her for five minutes, comprehend and are
comprehended."

"Allen," answered Faber, "Amy and I believe in spirit; and she, in whom
mind is dormant but spirit awake, feels in such belief a sympathy which
she has not, in that respect, with yourself, nor even with her mother.
You seek only through your mind to conjecture hers. Her mother has sense
clear enough where habitual experience can guide it, but that sense is
confused, and forsakes her when forced from the regular pathway in which
it has been accustomed to tread. Amy and I through soul guess at soul,
and though mostly contented with earth, we can both rise at times into
heaven. We pray."

"Alas!" said I, half mournfully, half angrily, "when you thus speak of
Mind as distinct from Soul, it was only in that Vision which you bid
me regard as the illusion of a fancy stimulated by chemical vapours,
producing on the brain an effect similar to that of opium or the
inhalation of the oxide gas, that I have ever seen the silver spark of
the Soul distinct from the light of the Mind. And holding, as I do, that
all intellectual ideas are derived from the experiences of the body,
whether I accept the theory of Locke, or that of Condillac, or that into
which their propositions reach their final development in the wonderful
subtlety of Hume, I cannot detect the immaterial spirit in the material