explanatory hypotheses hit or approach the truth
—still what a terrible power you would assign
to man's will over men's reason and deeds!"

"Man's will," answered Faber, "has over
men's deeds and reason, habitual and daily,
power infinitely greater, and, when uncounter-
balanced, infinitely more dangerous than that
which superstition exaggerates in magic. Man's
will moves a war that decimates a race, and
leaves behind it calamities little less dire than
slaughter. Man's will frames, but it also
corrupts laws; exalts, but also demoralises
opinion; sets the world mad with fanaticism, as
often as it curbs the heart's fierce instincts by
the wisdom of brotherlike mercy. You revolt
at the exceptional, limited sway over some two
or three individuals which the arts of a sorcerer
(if sorcerer there be) can effect; and yet, at the
very moment in which you were perplexed and
appalled by such sway, or by your reluctant
belief in it, your will was devising an engine
to unsettle the reason and wither the hopes of
millions!"

"My will! What engine?"

"A book conceived by your intellect, adorned
by your learning, and directed by your will to
steal from the minds of other men their
persuasion of the soul's everlasting Hereafter."

I bowed my head, and felt myself grow pale.

"And if we accept Bacon's theory of ' secret
sympathy,' or the plainer physiological maxim
that there must be in the imagination, morbidly
impressed by the will of another, some trains of
idea in affinity with such influence and
preinclined to receive it, no magician could warp you
to evil, except through thoughts that themselves
went astray. Grant that the Margrave, who still
haunts your mind, did really, by some occult,
sinister magnetism, guide the madman to murder
—did influence the servant woman's vulgar desire
to pry into the secrets of her ill-fated master—
or the old maid's covetous wish and envious
malignity— what could this awful magician do more
than any common-place guilty adviser, to a mind
predisposed to accept the advice?"

"You forget one example which destroys
your argument— the spell which this mysterious
fascinator could cast upon a creature so pure
from all guilt as Lilian!"

"Will you forgive me if I answer frankly?"

"Speak."

"Your Lilian is spotless and pure as you
deem her, and the fascination, therefore,
attempts no lure through a sinful desire; it
blends with its attraction no sentiment of
affection untrue to yourself. Nay, it is
justice to your Lilian, and may be a melancholy
comfort to you, to state my conviction, based
on the answers my questions have drawn from
her, that you were never more cherished by her
love than when that love seemed to forsake you.
Her imagination impressed her with the
illusion that through your love for her you were
threatened with a great peril. What seemed
the levity of her desertion was the devotion of
self-sacrifice. And, in her strange, dream-led
wanderings, do not think that she was conscious
of the fascination you impute to this mysterious
Margrave; in her belief, it was your own
guardian angel that guided her steps, and her
pilgrimage was ordained to disarm the foe that
menaced you, and dissolve the spell that divided
her life from yours! But had she not long
before this wilfully prepared herself to be so
deceived? Had not her fancies been deliberately
encouraged to dwell remote from the duties we
are placed on the earth to perform? The loftiest
faculties in our nature are those that demand
the finest poise, not to fall from their height and
crush all the walls that they crown. With
exquisite beauty of illustration, Hume says of the
dreamers of ' bright fancies,' ' that they may be
compared to those angels whom the Scriptures
represent as covering their eyes with their wings.'
Had you been, like my nephew, a wrestler for
bread with the wilderness, what helpmate would
your Lilian have been to you? How often
would you have cried out in justifiable anger,
' I, son of Adam, am on earth not in paradise.
Oh, that my Eve were at home on my hearth,
and not in the skies with the seraphs!' No
Margrave, I venture to say, could have
suspended the healthful affections, or charmed into
danger the wide-awake soul, of my Amy. When
she rocks in its cradle the babe the young
parents entrusts to her heed—when she calls
the kine to the milking, the chicks to their
corn—when she but flits through my room to
renew the flowers on the stand, or range in
neat order the books that I read—no spell on
her fancy could lead her a step from the range
of her provident cares! At day she is contented
to be on the common-place earth; at evening,
she and I knock together at the one door of
heaven, which opes to thanksgiving and prayer,
and thanksgiving and prayer send us back, calm,
and hopeful, to the tasks that each morrow
renews."

I looked up as the old man paused, and in the
limpid clearness of the Australian atmosphere, I
saw the child he thus praised standing by the
garden-gate, looking towards us, and, though
still distant, she seemed near. I felt wroth
with her. My heart so cherished my harmless,
defenceless Lilian, that I was jealous of the praise
taken from her to be bestowed on another.

"Each of us," said I, coldly, " has his or her
own nature, and the uses harmonious to that
nature's idiosyncrasy. The world, I grant,
would get on very ill if women were not, more
or less, actively useful and quietly good, like
your Amy. But the world would lose standards
that exalt and refine, if no woman were
permitted to gain, through the indulgence of
fancy, thoughts exquisite as those which my
Lilian conceived, while thought, alas, flowed
out of fancy. I do not wound you by citing
your Amy as a type of the mediocre. I do not
claim for Lilian the rank we accord to the type
of genius. But both are alike to such types in
this: viz. that the uses of mediocrity are for everyday
life, and the uses of genius, amidst a thousand
mistakes which mediocrity never commits, are
to suggest and perpetuate ideas which raise the