mine to be so strong, so vivid, that to
deny me its gratification would produce the very emotion from which you
warn me as fatal,--storm the heart, that you would soothe to repose, by
the passions of rage and despair,--would you, as my trusted physician,
concede or deny me my whim?"

"Can you ask? I should grant it at once, if I had no reason to know that
the thing that you fancied was harmful."

"Good man and wise doctor! I have no other question to ask. I thank
you."

Faber looked hard on the young, wan face, over which played a smile
of triumph and irony; then turned away with an expression of doubt and
trouble on his own noble countenance. I followed him silently into the
open air.

"Who and what is this visitor of yours?" he asked abruptly.

"Who and what? I cannot tell you."

Faber remained some moments musing, and muttering slowly to himself,
"Tut! but a chance coincidence,--a haphazard allusion to a fact which he
could not have known!"

"Faber," said I, abruptly, "can it be that Lilian is the patient in
whose self-suggested remedies you confide more than in the various
learning at command of your practised skill?"

"I cannot deny it," replied Faber, reluctantly. "In the intervals of
that suspense from waking sense, which in her is not sleep, nor yet
altogether catalepsy, she has, for the last few days, stated accurately
the precise moment in which the trance--if I may so call it--would
pass away, and prescribed for herself the remedies that should be then
administered. In every instance, the remedies so self-prescribed, though
certainly not those which would have occurred to my mind, have proved
efficacious. Her rapid progress to reason I ascribe to the treatment
she herself ordained in her trance, without remembrance of her own
suggestions when she awoke. I had meant to defer communicating these
phenomena in the idiosyncrasy of her case until our minds could more
calmly inquire into the process by which ideas--not apparently derived,
as your metaphysical school would derive all ideas, from preconceived
experiences--will thus sometimes act like an instinct on the human
sufferer for self-preservation, as the bird is directed to the herb
or the berry which heals or assuages its ailments. We know how the
mesmerists would account for this phenomenon of hygienic introvision and
clairvoyance. But here, there is no mesmerizer, unless the patient can
be supposed to mesmerize herself. Long, however, before mes