feet, often with her work—which was always
destined for him or for one of her absent
brothers—now and then, with the one small
book that she had carried with her, a selection
of Bible stories compiled for children;—sometimes
when I saw her thus, how I wished that
Lilian, too, could have seen her, and have
compared her own ideal phantasies with those young
developments of the natural heavenly Woman!

But was there nothing in that sight from
which I, proud of my arid reason even in its
perplexities, might have taken lessons for
myself?

On the second evening of Faber's visit I
brought to him the draft of deeds for the sale of
his property. He had never been a man of
business out of his profession; he was impatient to
sell his property, and disposed to accept an offer
at half its value. I insisted on taking on myself
the task of negotiator; perhaps, too, in this
office I was egotistically anxious to prove to the
great physician that that which he believed to be
my "hallucination" had in no way obscured my
common sense in the daily affairs of life. So I
concluded, and in a few hours, terms for his
property that were only just, but were infinitely more
advantageous than had appeared to himself to be
possible. But, as I approached him with the
papers, he put his finger to his lips. Amy was
standing by him with her little book in her hand,
and his own Bible lay open on the table. He
was reading to her from the Sacred Volume itself,
and impressing on her the force and beauty of
one of the Parables, the adaptation of which had
perplexed her; when he had done, she kissed
him, bade him good night, and went away to
rest. Then said Faber thoughtfully, and as if to
himself more than me,

"What a lovely bridge between old age and
childhood is religion! How intuitively the child
begins with prayer and worship on entering
life, and how intuitively on quitting life the
old man turns back to prayer and worship,
putting himself again side by side with the
infant!"

I made no answer, but, after a pause, spoke of
fines and freeholds, title-deeds and money; and
when the business on hand was concluded, asked
my learned guest if, before he departed, he
would deign to look over the pages of my
ambitious Physiological Work. There were parts of
it on which I much desired his opinion, touching
on subjects in which his special studies made
him an authority as high as our land possessed.

He made me bring him the manuscript, and
devoted much of that night and the next day to
its perusal.

When he gave it me back, which was not till
the morning of his departure, he commenced
with eulogies on the scope of its design and the
manner of its execution, which flattered my
vanity so much that I could not help exclaiming,
"Then, at least, there is no trace of 'hallucination'
here!"

"Alas, my poor Allen! here, perhaps, hallucination,
or self-deception, is more apparent than
in all the strange tales you confided to me. For
here is the hallucination of the man seated on
the shores of Nature, and who would say to its
measureless sea, 'So far shalt thou go and no
farther!'—here is the hallucination of the
creature, who, not content with exploring the laws
of the Creator, ends with submitting to his
interpretation of some three or four laws, in the
midst of a code of which all the rest are in
language unknown to him—the powers and free-will
of the Lawgiver himself; here is the hallucination
by which Nature is left Godless—because
Man is left soulless. What would matter all our
speculations on a Deity who would cease to exist
for us when we are in the grave? Why mete
out, like Archytas, the earth and the sea, and
number the sands on the shore that divides them,
if the end of this wisdom be a handful of dust
sprinkled over a skull!

'Nec quidquam tibi prodest
Aerias tentasse domos, animoque rotundum
Percurrisse polum morituro.'

Your book is a proof of the soul that you fail to
discover. Without a soul, no man would work for
a Future that begins for his fame when the breath
is gone from his body. Do you remember how
you saw that little child praying at the grave of
her father? Shall I tell you that in her simple
orisons she prayed for the benefactor—who had
cared for the orphan; who had reared over
dust that tomb which, in a Christian burial-
ground, is a mute but perceptible memorial
of Christian hopes; that the child prayed,
haughty man, for you? And you sat by, knowing
nought of this; sat by, amongst the graves,
troubled and tortured with ghastly doubts—vain
of a reason that was sceptical of eternity, and
yet shaken like a reed by a moment's marvel.
Shall I tell the child to pray for you no more?—
that you disbelieve in a soul? If you do so, what
is the efficacy of prayer? Speak, shall I tell her
this? Shall the infant pray for you never
more?"

I was silent; I was thrilled.

"Has it never occurred to you, who, in
denying all innate perceptions as well as ideas,
have passed on to deductions from which poor
Locke, humble Christian that he was, would
have shrunk in dismay; has it never occurred
to you as a wonderful fact, that the easiest
thing in the world to teach a child is that
which seems to metaphysical schoolmen the
abstrusest of all problems? Head all those
philosophers wrangling about a First Cause,
deciding on what are miracles, and then again
deciding that such miracles cannot be; and
when one has answered another, and left in the
crucible of wisdom a caput mortuum of ignorance,
then turn your eyes, and look at the infant
praying to the invisible God at his mother's
knees. This idea, so miraculously abstract, of a
Power that the infant has never seen, that cannot
be symbolled forth and explained to him by
the most erudite sage,—a Power, nevertheless,