"How! did she, too, say she saw a Shadow
and heard a Voice?"

"No; not such a liar as that, and not mad
enough for such a lie. But she said that when
she was in bed, thinking over the book, something
irresistible urged her to get up and go
down into the study; swore she felt something
lead her by the hand; swore, too, that when
she first discovered the manuscript was not in
English, something whispered in her ear to turn
over the leaves and approach them to the candle.
But I had no patience to listen to all this rubbish.
I sent her out of the house, bag and
baggage. But, alas! is this to be the end of all
my wise cousin's grand discoveries?"

True, of labours that aspired to bring into the
chart of science new worlds, of which even the
traditionary rumour was but a voice from the
land of fable—nought left but broken vestiges
of a daring footstep! The hope of a name
imperishable amidst the loftiest hierarchy of Nature's
secret temple, with all the pomp of recorded
experiment, that applied to the mysteries of
Egypt and Chaldaea the inductions of Bacon,
the tests of Liebig—was there nothing left of
this but what, here and there, some puzzled
student might extract, garbled, mutilated, perhaps
unintelligible, from shreds of sentences,
wrecks of problems? O mind of man, can the
works, on which thou wouldst found immortality
below, be annulled into smoke and tinder by an
inch of candle in the hand of an old woman!

When Strahan left me, I went out, but not
yet to visit patients. I stole through by-paths
into the fields; I needed solitude to bring my
thoughts into shape and order. What was
delusion, and what not?—was I right or the
public? Was Margrave really the most innocent
and serviceable of human beings, kindly,
affectionate, employing a wonderful acuteness for
benignant ends? Was I, in truth, indebted to
him for the greatest boon one man can bestow
on another? For life rescued, for fair name justified?
Or had he, by some demoniac sorcery,
guided the hand of the murderer against the
life of the person who alone could imperil his
own? had he, by the same dark spells, urged the
woman to the act that had destroyed the only
record of his monstrous being—the only evidence
that I was not the sport of an illusion in the
horror with which he inspired me?

But if the latter supposition could be admissable,
did he use his agents only to betray
them afterwards to exposure, and that, without
any possible clue to his own detection as the
instigator? Then, there came over me confused
recollections of tales of mediaeval witchcraft,
which I had read in boyhood. Were there
not on judicial record attestation and evidence,
solemn and circumstantial, of powers analogous
to those now exercised by Margrave? Of
sorcerers instigating to sin through influences
ascribed to Demons—making their apparitions
glide through guarded walls, their voices heard
from afar in the solitude of dungeons or monastic
cells? subjugating victims to their will,
by means which no vigilance could have detected,
if the victims themselves had not confessed
the witchcraft that had ensnared—courting
ing a sure and infamous death in that confession—
preferring such death to a life so haunted?
Were stories so gravely set forth in the pomp of
judicial evidence, and in the history of times
comparatively recent, indeed, to be massed
pell-mell together, as a moles indigesta of
senseless superstition,—all the witnesses to be
deemed liars? all the victims and tools of the
sorcerers, lunatics? all the examiners or judges,
with their solemn gradations—lay and clerical—
from Commissions of Inquiry to 'Courts of Appeal,
—to be despised for credulity, loathed for
cruelty; or, amidst records so numerous, so
imposingly attested,—were there the fragments
of a terrible truth? And had our ancestors
been so unwise in those laws we now deem
so savage, by which the world was rid of
scourges more awful and more potent than the
felon with his candid dagger? Fell instigators
of the evil in men's secret hearts—shaping into
action the vague, half-formed desire, and guiding
with agencies, impalpable, unseen, their spellbound
instruments of calamity and death.

Such were the gloomy questions that I—by
repute, the sternest advocate of common sense
against fantastic errors;—by profession, the
searcher into flesh and blood, and tissue, and
nerve, and sinew, for the causes of all that disease
the mechanism of the universal human
frame;—I, self-boasting physician, sceptic, philosopher,
materialist—revolved, not amidst gloomy
pines, under grim winter skies, but as I paced
slow through laughing meadows, and by the
banks of merry streams, in the ripeness of the
golden August; the hum of insects in the fragrant
grass, the flutter of birds amid the delicate
green of boughs chequered by playful
sunbeams and gentle shadows, and ever in
sight of the resorts of busy work-day man.
Walls, roof-tops, church-spires rising high.
There, white and modern, the handwriting of
our race, in this practical nineteenth century,
on its square plain masonry and Doric shafts,
the Town-Hall, central in the animated market-place.
And I—I—prying into long-neglected
corners and dust-holes of memory for what my
reason had flung there as worthless rubbish;
reviving the jargon of French law, in the
procès verbal, against a Gille de Retz, or an
Urbain Grandier, and sifting the equity of sentences
on witchcraft!

Bursting the links of this ghastly soliloquy
with a laugh at my own folly, I struck into a
narrow path that led back towards the city, by
a quiet and rural suburb: the path wound on
through a wide and solitary churchyard, at the
base of the Abbey-hill. Many of the former dwellers
on that eminence now slept in the lowly burial-ground
at its foot. And the place, mournfully
decorated with the tombs which still jealously
mark distinctions of rank amidst the levelling
democracy of the grave, was kept trim with the
care which comes half from piety, and half from
pride.

I seated myself on a bench, placed between