in nature are upon record; but we must go by
general laws, and not by exceptions."

"Have you never known instances, do you
not at this moment know one, in which a
patient whose malady baffles the doctor's skill,
imagines or dreams of a remedy? Call it a whim
if you please, learned sir; do you not listen to
the whim, and, in despair of your own
prescriptions, comply with those of the patient?"

Faber changed countenance, and even started.
Margrave watched him, and laughed.

"You grant that there are such cases, in
which the patient gives the law to the physician.
Now, apply your experience to my case. Suppose
some strange fancy had seized upon my
imagination—that is the doctor's cant word for
all phenomena that we call exceptional—some
strange fancy that I had thought of a cure for
this disease for which you have no drugs; and
suppose this fancy of mine to be so strong, so
vivid, that to deny me its gratification would
produce the very emotion from which you warn
me as fatal—storm the heart, that you would
soothe to repose, by the passions of rage and
despair—would you, as my trusted physician,
concede or deny me my whim?"

"Can you ask? I should grant it at once, if
I had no reason to know that the thing which
you fancied was harmful."

"Good man and wise doctor. I have no
other question to ask. I thank you."

Faber looked hard on the young wan face,
over which played a smile of triumph and irony;
then turned away with an expression of doubt
and trouble on his own noble countenance. I
followed him silently into the open air.

"Who and what is this visitor of yours?" he
asked, abruptly.

"Who and what! I cannot tell you."

Faber remained some moments musing, and
muttering slowly to himself, "Tut; but a chance
coincidence—a hap-hazard allusion to a fact
which he could not have known!"

"Faber," said I, abruptly, "can it be that
Lilian is the patient in whose self-suggested
remedies you confide more than in the various
learning at command of your practised skill?"

"I cannot deny it," replied Faber, reluctantly.
"In the intervals of that suspense from waking
sense, which in her is not sleep, nor yet altogether
catalepsy, she has, for the last few days,
stated accurately the precise moment in which
the trance—if I may so call it—would pass
away, and prescribed for herself the remedies
that should be then administered. In every
instance the remedies so self-prescribed, though
certainly not those which would have occurred
to my mind, have proved efficacious. Her rapid
progress to reason I ascribe to the treatment
she herself ordained in her trance, without
remembrance of her own suggestions when she
awoke. I had meant to defer communicating
these phenomena in the idiosyncrasy of her case
until our minds could more calmly inquire into
the process by which ideas—not apparently
derived as your metaphysical school would derive
all ideas, from preconceived experiences—will
thus sometimes act like an instinct on the
human sufferer, for self-preservation, as the
bird is directed to the herb or the berry
which heals or assuages its ailments. We
know how the mesmerists would account for
this phenomenon of hygienic introvision and
clairvoyance. But here, there is no mesmeriser,
unless the patient can be supposed to
mesmerise herself. Long, however, before
mesmerism was heard of, medical history attests
examples in which patients who baffled the skill
of the ablest physicians have fixed their fancies on
some remedy that physicians would call inoperative
for good or for harm, and have recovered by
the remedies thus singularly self-suggested.
And Hippocrates himself, if I construe his
meaning rightly, recognises the powers for self-
cure which the condition of trance will sometimes
bestow on the sufferer, 'where' (says the
father of our art) ' the sight being closed to the
external, the soul more truthfully perceives the
affections of the body.' In short—I own it—
in this instance, the skill of the physician
has been a compliant obedience to the instinct
called forth in the patient. And the hopes
I have hitherto permitted myself to give you,
were founded on my experience that her own
hopes, conceived in trance, had never been
fallacious or exaggerated. The simples that I
gathered for her yesterday she had described;
they are not in our herbal. But as they are
sometimes used by the natives, I had the
curiosity to analyse their chemical properties
shortly after I came to the colony, and they
seemed to me as innocent as lime-blossoms.
They are rare in this part of Australia, but she
told me where I should find them—a remote spot,
which she has certainly never visited. Last
night, when you saw me disturbed, dejected, it
was because, for the first time, the docility
with which she had hitherto in her waking
state obeyed her own injunctions in the state
of trance, forsook me. She could not be
induced to taste the decoction I had made from
the herbs; and if you found me this morning
with weaker hopes than before, this is the real
cause—viz. that when I visited her at sunrise,
she was not in sleep but in trance, and in
that trance she told me that she had nothing
more to suggest or reveal; that on the complete
restoration of her senses, which was at hand,
the abnormal faculties vouchsafed to trance
would be withdrawn. ' As for my life,' she said,
quietly, as if unconscious of our temporary joy
or woe in the term of its tenure here—'as for my
life, your aid is now idle; my own vision
obscure; on my life a dark and cold shadow is
resting. I cannot foresee if it will pass away.
When I strive to look around, I see but my
Allen———'"

"And so," said I, mastering my emotions,
"in bidding me hope, you did not rely on your
own resources of science, but on the whisper of
Nature in the brain of your patient?"

"It is so."

We both remained silent some moments, and