And be my readers few or many, there will be
no small proportion of them to whom, once, at
least, in the course of their existence, a
something strange and eirie lias occurred—a
something which perplexed and baffled rational
conjecture, and struck on those chords which vibrate
to superstition. It may have been only a dream
unaccountably verified, an undefinable presentiment
or forewarning; but up from such slighter
and vaguer tokens of the realm of marvel—up to
the portents of ghostly apparitions or haunted
chambers, I believe that the greater number of
persons arrived at middle age, however instructed
the class, however civilised the land, however
sceptical the period, to which they belong, have
either in themselves experienced, or heard
recorded by intimate associates whose veracity they
accept as indisputable in all ordinary transactions
of life—phenomena which are not to be solved by
the wit that mocks them, nor, perhaps, always and
entirely, to the contentment of the reason or the
philosophy that explains them away. Such phenomena,
I say, are infinitely more numerous than
would appear from the instances currently quoted
and dismissed with a jest, for few of those who
have witnessed them are disposed to own it, and
they who only hear of them through others,
however trustworthy, would not impugn their
character for common sense by professing a belief to
which common sense is a merciless persecutor.
But he who reads my assertion in the quiet of his
own room will, perhaps, pause, ransack his
memory, and find there in some dark corner which
he excludes from "the babbling and remorseless
day" a pale recollection that proves the assertion
not untrue.

And it is, I say, an instance of the absorbing
tyranny of every-day life that whenever some
such startling incident disturbs its regular tenor
of thought and occupation, that same every-day
life hastens to bury in its sands the object which
has troubled its surface; the more unaccountable,
the more prodigious has been the phenomenon
which has scared and astounded us; the
more, with involuntary effort, the mind seeks to
rid itself of an enigma which might disease the
reason that tries to solve it. We go about our
mundane business with renewed avidity; we
feel the necessity of proving to ourselves that
we are still sober practical men, and refuse
to be unfitted for the world which we know,
by unsolicited visitations from worlds into which
every glimpse is soon lost amid shadows.
And it amazes us to think how soon such
incidents, though not actually forgotten, though
they can be recalled—and recalled too vividly
for health—at our will, are, nevertheless, thrust,
as it were, out of the mind's sight, as we cast
into lumber-rooms the crutches and splints
that remind us of a broken limb which has
recovered its strength and tone. It is a felicitous
peculiarity in our organisation, which all
members of my profession will have noticed, how
soon, when a bodily pain is once past, it becomes
erased from the recollection, how soon and how
invariably the mind refuses to linger over and
recal it. No man freed an hour before from a
raging tooth-ache, the rack of a neuralgia, seats
himself in his arm-chair to recollect and ponder
upon the anguish he has undergone. It is the
same with certain afflictions of the mind—not
with those that strike on our affections, or blast ,
our fortunes, overshadowing our whole future
with a sense of loss—but where a trouble or
calamity has been an accident, an episode in our
wonted life, where it affects ourselves alone,
where it is attended with a sense of shame and
humiliation, where the pain of recalling it seems
idle, and if indulged would almost madden us;
agonies of that kind we do not brood over as we
do over the death or falsehood of beloved friends,
or the train of events by which we are reduced
from wealth to penury. No one, for instance,
who has escaped from a shipwreck, from the
brink of a precipice, from the jaws of a tiger,
spends his days and nights in reviving his terrors
past, re-imagining dangers not to occur again,
or, if they do occur, from which the experience
undergone can suggest no additional safeguards.
The current of our life, indeed, like that of the
rivers, is most rapid in the midmost channel,
where all streams are alike, comparatively slow
in the depth and along the shores in which each
life, as each river, has a character peculiar to
itself. And hence, those who would sail with
the tide of the world, as those who sail with the
tide of a river, hasten to take the middle of the
stream, as those who sail against the tide are
found clinging to the shore. I returned to my
habitual duties and avocations with renewed
energy; I did not suffer my thoughts to dwell
on the dreary wonders that had haunted me,
from the evening I first met Sir Philip Derval
to the morning in which I had quitted the
house of his heir; whether realities or
hallucinations, no guess of mine could unravel
such marvels, and no prudence of mine guard
me against their repetition. But I had no fear
that they would be repeated, any more than the
man who has gone through shipwreck, or the
hairbreadth escape from a fall down a glacier,
fears again to be found in a similar peril.
Margrave had departed, whither I knew not, and,
with his departure, ceased all sense of his
influence. A certain calm within me, a
tranquillising feeling of relief, seemed to me like a
pledge of permanent delivery.

But that which did accompany and haunt me
through all my occupations and pursuits, was the
melancholy remembrance of the love I had lost
in Lilian. I heard from Mrs. Ashleigh, who
still frequently visited me, that her daughter
seemed much in the same quiet state of mind
—perfectly reconciled to our separation—seldom
mentioning my name—if mentioning it, with
indifference; the only thing remarkable in her
state was her aversion to all society, and a kind
of lethargy that would come over her, often in
the daytime. She would suddenly fall into sleep,
and so remain for hours, but a sleep that seemed