merism was
heard of, medical history attests examples in which patients who baffled
the skill of the ablest physicians have fixed their fancies on some
remedy that physicians would call inoperative for good or for harm,
and have recovered by the remedies thus singularly self-suggested. And
Hippocrates himself, if I construe his meaning rightly, recognizes the
powers for self-cure which the condition of trance will sometimes bestow
on the sufferer, 'where' (says the father of our art) 'the sight
being closed to the external, the soul more truthfully perceives the
affections of the body.' In short--I own it--in this instance, the skill
of the physician has been a compliant obedience to the instinct called
forth in the patient; and the hopes I have hitherto permitted myself to
give you were founded on my experience that her own hopes, conceived
in trance, bad never been fallacious or exaggerated. The simples that
I gathered for her yesterday she had described; they are not in our
herbal. But as they are sometimes used by the natives, I had the
curiosity to analyze their chemical properties shortly after I came to
the colony, and they seemed to me as innocent as lime-blossoms. They
are rare in this part of Australia, but she told me where I should find
them,--a remote spot, which she has certainly never visited. Last night,
when you saw me disturbed, dejected, it was because, for the first time,
the docility with which she had hitherto, in her waking state, obeyed
her own injunctions in the state of trance, forsook her. She could not
be induced to taste the decoction I had made from the herbs; and if you
found me this morning with weaker hopes than before, this is the real
cause,--namely, that when I visited her at sunrise, she was not in sleep
but in trance, and in that trance she told me that she had nothing more
to suggest or reveal; that on the complete restoration of her senses,
which was at hand, the abnormal faculties vouchsafed to trance would be
withdrawn. 'As for my life,' she said quietly, as if unconscious of our
temporary joy or woe in the term of its tenure here,--'as for my life,
your aid is now idle; my own vision obscure; on my life a dark and cold
shadow is resting. I cannot foresee if it will pass away. When I strive
to look around, I see but my Allen--'"

"And so," said I, mastering my emotions, "in bidding me hope, you did
not rely on your own resources of science, but on the whisper of Nature
in the br