hers and sisters. She knew she was under Dorman's
Isle, but she knew also that it was the dark space beneath the stage
of a theatre. When she entered, the rest of the family were already
assembled; but they none of them spoke to each other, and the doors
kept opening and shutting, and the people seemed to melt away, until
at last only three or four remained, and they were just going. She saw
the shine on the paint of the door-posts, and the smoke of the
torches, as they let themselves out. Then they had all gone, and left
her alone in a cave full of smoke. Vainly she struggled to follow
them, the doors were fast, the smoke was smothering her, and in the
agony of a last effort to escape she awoke.

In after days, when Beth began to think, she used to wonder how it was
she knew those people were her ancestors, and that the place was like
any part of a theatre. She had never heard either of ancestors or
theatres at that time. Was it recollection? Or is there some more
perfect power to know than the intellect--a power lying latent in the
whole race, which will eventually come into possession of it; but with
which, at present, only some few rare beings are perfectly endowed.
Beth had the sensation of having been nearer to something in her
infancy than she ever was again--nearer to knowing what it is the
trees whisper--what the murmur means, the all-pervading murmur which
sounds incessantly when everything is hushed, as at night; nearer to
the "arcane" of that evening on the Castle Hill when she first felt
her kinship with nature, and burst into song. It may have been
hereditary memory, a knowledge of things transmitted to her by her
ancestors along with their features, virtues, and vices; but, at any
rate, she herself was sure that she possessed a power of some kind in
her infancy which gradually lapsed as her intellectual faculties
developed. She was conscious that the senses had come between her and
some mysterious joy which was not of the senses, but of the spirit.
There lingered what seemed to be the recollection of a condition
anterior to this, a condition of which no tongue can tell, which is
not to be put into words, or made evident to those who have no
recollection; but which some will comprehend by the mere allusion to
it. All her life long Beth preserved a half consciousness of this
something--something which eluded her--something from which she
gradually drifted further away as she grew older--some sort of vision