to the ordinary privations and discomforts that
await the wife even of the wealthy emigrant.
Alas! would she have heeded them if she had
been?

The change of scene wrought a decided
change for the better in her health and spirits,
but not such as implied a dawn of reviving
reason. But her countenance was now more
rarely overcast. Its usual aspect was glad with
a soft mysterious smile. She would murmur
snatches of songs, that were partly borrowed
from English poets, partly gliding away into
what seemed spontaneous additions of her own
—wanting intelligible meaning, but never melody
nor rhyme. Strange, that memory and imitation
—the two earliest parents of all inventive
knowledge—should still be so active, and
judgment—the after faculty, that combines the rest
into purpose and method—be annulled!

Julius Faber I see continually, though his
residence is a few miles distant. He is sanguine as
to Lilian's ultimate recovery; and, to my amazement
and to my envy, he has contrived, by some
art which I cannot attain, to establish between
her and himself intelligible communion. She
comprehends his questions, when mine, though
the simplest, seem to her in unknown language;
and he construes into sense her words, that to
me are meaningless riddles.

"I was right," he said to me one day, leaving
her seated in the garden beside her quiet, patient
mother, and joining me where I lay—listless yet
fretful—under the shadeless gum-trees, gazing
not on the flocks and fields that I could call my
own, but on the far mountain range, from which
the arch of the horizon seemed to spring;—"I
was right," said the great physician; " this is
reason suspended, not reason lost. Your wife
will recover; but——"

"But what?"

"Give me your arm as I walk homeward, and
I will tell you the conclusion to which I have
come."

I rose, the old man leant on me, and we went
down the valley, along the craggy ridges of the
winding creek. The woodland on the opposite
bank was vocal with the chirp, and croak, and
chatter of Australian birds—all mirthful, all
songless, save that sweetest of warblers, which
some early irreverent emigrant degraded to the
name of magpie, but whose note is sweeter than
the nightingale's, and trills through the lucent
air with a distinct ecstatic melody of joy that
dominates all the discords;—so ravishing the
sense, that, while it sings, the ear scarcely heeds
the scream of the parrots.

CHAPTER LXXI.

"You may remember," said Julius Faber,
"Sir Humphry Davy's eloquent description of
the effect produced on him by the inhalation
of nitrous oxide. He states that he began to
lose the perception of external things: trains of
vivid visible images rapidly passed through his
mind, and were connected with words in such
a manner as to produce perceptions perfectly
novel.

'I existed,' he says, 'in a world of
newly-connected and newly-modified ideas.'
When he recovered, he exclaimed: 'Nothing
exists but thoughts; the universe is composed
of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!'

"Now observe, that thus, a cultivator of
positive science, endowed with one of the healthiest
of human brains, is, by the inhalation of a gas,
abstracted from all external life, enters into a
new world, which consists of images he
himself creates, and animates so vividly that, on
waking, he resolves the universe itself into
thoughts."

"Well," said I, "but what inference do you
draw from that voluntary experiment, applicable
to the malady of which you bid me hope the
cure?"

"Simply this: that the effect produced on a
healthful brain by the nitrous oxide may be
produced also by moral causes operating on the
blood, or on the nerves. There is a degree of
mental excitement in which ideas are more vivid ,
than sensations, and then the world of external
things gives way to the world within the brain.*
But this, though a suspension of that reason
which comprehends accuracy of judgment, is no
more a permanent aberration of reason than were
Sir Humphry Davy's visionary ecstasies under
the influence of the gas. The difference between
the two states of suspension is that of time, and
it is but an affair of time with our beloved
patient. Yet prepare yourself. I fear that the
mind will not recover without some critical
malady of the body."

* See, on the theory elaborated from this principle,
Dr. Hibbert's interesting and valuable work on the
Philosophy of Apparitions.

"Critical! but not dangerous?—say not
dangerous. I can endure the pause of her
reason; I could not endure the void in the

universe if her life were to fade from the earth."

"Poor friend! would not you yourself rather
lose life than reason?"

"I—yes! But we men are taught to set cheap
value on our own lives; we do not estimate at the
same mean rate the lives of those we love. Did
we do so, Humanity would lose its virtues."

"What, then! Love teaches that there is
something of nobler value than mere mind? yet
surely it cannot be the mere body? What is it,
if not that continuance of being which your
philosophy declines to acknowledge—viz. SOUL? If
you fear so painfully that your Lilian should die,
is it not that you fear to lose her for ever?"

"Oh, cease, cease," I cried, impatiently. "I
cannot now argue on metaphysics. What is it
that you anticipate of harm to her life? Her
health has been stronger ever since her affliction.
She never seems to know ailment now. Do you
not perceive that her cheek has a more hardy
bloom, her frame a more rounded symmetry,
than when you saw her in England?"

"Unquestionably. Her physical forces have
been silently recruiting themselves in the dreams
which half lull, half amuse, her imagination.
IMAGINATION, that faculty, the most glorious which
is bestowed on the human mind, because it is the