but came often without any warning.
3. She never, in any instance, recalled anything that happened during the trance, after it was passed.
4. She was powerfully and unpleasantly affected by electricity from a battery, or acting in milder forms. She was also unable at any time to put her hands and arms into hot water; the effect was to paralyze them at once.
5. Space proved to be no impediment to her vision. She has been known to follow the acts, words, and expressions of countenance of members of the family hundreds of miles away, with accuracy; as was afterwards proved by comparing notes as to time.
6. The girl's eyes, after her trances became habitual, assumed, and always retained, the most singular expression I ever saw on any face. They were oblong and narrow, and set back in her head like the eyes of a snake. They were not—smile if you will, O practical and incredulous reader!—but they were not human eyes. The eyes of Elsie Venner are the only eyes I can think of as at all like them. The most horrible circumstance about them—a circumstance that always made me shudder, familiar as I was with it—was, that, though turned fully on you, they never looked at you. Something behind them or out of them did the seeing, not they.
7. She not only saw substance, but soul. She has repeatedly told me my thoughts when they were upon subjects to which she could not by any possibility have had the slightest clew.
8. We were never able to detect a shadow of deceit about her.
9. The clairvoyance never failed in any instance to be correct, so far as we were able to trace it.
As will be readily imagined, the girl became a useful member of the family. The lost valuables restored and the warnings against mischances given by her quite balanced her incapacity for peculiar kinds of work. This incapacity, however, rather increased than diminished, and, together with her fickle health, which also grew more unsettled, caused us a great deal of care. The Creston physician—who was a keen man in his way, for a country doctor—pronounced the case altogether undreamt of before in Horatio's philosophy, and kept constant notes of it. Some of these have, I believe, found their way into the medical journals.
After a while there came, like a thief in the night, that which I suppose was poor Selphar's one unconscious, golden mission in this world. It came on a quiet summer night, that ended a long trance of a week's continuance. Mother had gone out into the kitchen to give an order for breakfast. I heard a few eager words in Selphar's voice, and then the door shut quickly, and it was an hour before it was opened.
Then my mother came to me without a particle of color in lips or cheek, and drew me away alone, and told the secret to me.
Selphar had seen Aunt Alice.
We sat down and looked at one another. There was a singular pinched look about my mother's mouth.
"Sarah."
"Yes."
"She says"—and then she told me what she said. She had seen Alice Stuart in a Western town, seven hundred miles away. Among the living, she desired to be counted of the dead. And that was all.
My mother paced the room three times back and forth, her hands locked.
"Sarah." There was a chill in her voice—it had been such a gentle voice!—that froze me. "Sarah, the girl is an impostor."
"Mother!"
She paced the room, once more, three times, back and forth. "At any rate, she is a poor, self-deluded creature. How can she see, seven hundred miles away, a dead woman who has been an angel all these years? Think! an angel, Sarah! So much better than I, and I—I loved—"
Before or since, I never heard my mother speak like that. She broke off sharply, and froze back into her chilling voice.
"We will say nothing about this, if you please. I do not believe a word of it."
We said nothing about it, but Selphar did. The delusion, if delusion it were, clung to her, haunted her, pursued her, week after week. To rid her of it, or to silence her, was impossible. She added no new facts to her first statement, but insisted that the long-lost dead was yet alive, with a quiet pertinacity that it was simply impossible to ridicule, frighten, threaten, or cross-question out of her, Clara was so thoroughly alarmed that she would not have slept alone for any mortal—perhaps not for any immortal—considerations. Winthrop and I talked the matter over often and gravely when we were alone and in quiet places. Mother's lips were sealed. From the day when Sel made the first disclosure, she was never heard once to refer to the matter. A perceptible haughtiness crept into her manner towards the girl. She even talked of dismissing her; but repented it, and melted into momentary gentleness. I could have cried over her that night. I was beginning to understand what a pitiful struggle her life had become, and how utterly alone she must be in it. She would not believe—she knew not what. She could not doubt the girl. And with the conflict even her children could not intermeddle.
To understand the crisis into which she was brought, the reader must bear in mind our long habit of belief, not only in Selphar's personal honesty, but in the infallibility of her mysterious power. Indeed, it had almost ceased to be mysterious to us, from daily familiarity. We had come to regard it as the curious working of physical disease, had taken its results as a matter of course, and had ceased, in common with converted Creston, to doubt the girl's capacity for seeing anything that she chose to, at any place.
Thus a year wore on. My mother grew sleepless and pallid. She laughed often, in a nervous, shallow way, as unlike her as a butterfly is unlike a sunset; and her face settled into an habitual sharpness and hardness unutterably painful to me.
Once only I ventured to break into the silence of the haunting thought that she knew, and we knew, was never escaped by either. "Mother, it would do no harm for Winthrop to go out West, and—"
She interrupted me sternly: "Sarah, I had not thought you capable of such childish superstition. I wish that girl and her nonsense had never come into this house!"—turning sharply away, and out of the room.
Just what that year was to my mother, I suppose only God and she have ever known, or will know.
But it ended. It ended at last, as I had prayed every night and morning of it that it should end. Mother came into my room one night, locked the door behind her, and, walking over to the window, stood with her face turned from me.
"Sarah."
"Yes."
"Sarah."
But that was all for a little while. Then,—"Sick and in suffering, Sarah,—the girl—she may be right, God Almighty knows! Sick and in suffering, you see. I am going. I think, I—"
The voice broke and melted utterly. I stole away and left her alone.
Creston put on its spectacles and looked wise on learning, the next day, that Mrs. Dugald had taken the earliest morning train for the West, on sudden and important business. It was precisely what Creston expected, and just like the Dugalds for all the world,—gone to hunt up material for that genealogical book, or map, or tree, or something, that they thought nobody knew they were going to publish. O yes, Creston understood it perfectly.
Space forbids me to relate in detail the clews which Selphar had given as to the whereabouts of the wanderer. Her trances, just at this time, were somewhat scarce and fragmentary, and the information she had professed to give had come in snatches and very imperfectly,—the trance being apt to end suddenly at the moment when some important question was pending,
