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cited at the prospect of spiritual revelations. Her neighbor was a pallid, care-worn girl, with very red lips, and large brown eyes of great beauty. She was, as I learned afterwards, a magnetic patient of the doctor, and had deserted her husband, a master mechanic, to follow this new light. The others were, like myself, strangers brought hither by mere curiosity. One of them was a lady in deep black, closely veiled. Beyond her, and opposite to me, sat the sergeant, and next to him, the medium, a man named Blake. He was well dressed, and wore a good deal of jewelry, and had large, black sidewhiskers, -a shrewd - visaged, largenosed, full-lipped man, formed by nature to appreciate the pleasant things of sensual existence.

Before I had ended my survey, he turned to the lady in black, and asked if she wished to see any one in the spirit-world.

She said, "Yes," rather feebly.

"Is the spirit present?" he asked. Upon which two knocks were heard in affirmation.

"Ah!" said the medium, "the name is it is the name of a child. It is a male child. It is Albert, no, Alfred!"

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After this, several of the strangers were called upon to write the names of the dead with whom they wished to communicate. The names were spelled out by the agency of affirmative knocks when the correct letters were touched by the applicant, who was furnished with an alphabet card upon which he tapped the letters in turn, the medium, meanwhile, scanning his face very keenly. With some, the names were readily made out. With one, a stolid personage of disbelieving type, every attempt failed, until at last the spirits signified by knocks that he was a disturbing agency, and that while he remained all our efforts would fail. Upon this some of the company proposed that he should leave, of which invitation he took advantage with a sceptical sneer at the whole performance.

As he left us, the sergeant leaned over and whispered to the medium, who next addressed himself to me. "Sister Euphemia," he said, indicating the lady with large eyes, “will act as your medium. I am unable to do more. These things exhaust my nervous system."

"Sister Euphemia,” said the doctor, "will aid us. Think, if you please, sir, of a spirit, and she will endeavor

"Great Heaven!" said the lady. to summon it to our circle." "My child! my boy!"

On this the medium arose, and became strangely convulsed. "I see," he said, "I see a fair-haired boy. I see blue eyes, I see above you, beyond you -" at the same time pointing fixedly over her head.

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She turned with a wild start. "Where, whereabouts?"

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Upon this, a wild idea came into my head. I answered, "I am thinking as you directed me to do."

The medium sat with her arms folded, looking steadily at the centre of the table. For a few moments there was silence. Then a series of irregular knocks began. Are you present?" said the medium.

66

The affirmative raps were twice given.

"I should think," said the doctor, "that there were two spirits present.” His words sent a thrill through my heart.

"Are there two?" he questioned. A double rap.

"Yes, two," said the medium. "Will it please the spirits to make us conscious of their names in this world?" A single knock. “No.”

"Will it please them to say how they are called in the world of spirits?"

3,

Again came the irregular raps, 4, 8,6; then a pause, and 3, 4, 8, 7. "I think," said the authoress, "they must be numbers. Will the spirits," she said, "be good enough to aid us? Shall we use the alphabet?"

"Yes," was rapped very quickly.
"Are these numbers?"
"Yes," again.

"I will write them,” she added, and, doing so, took up the card and tapped the letters. The spelling was pretty rapid, and ran thus as she tapped in turn, first the letters, and last the numbers she had already set down :

“UNITED STATES ARMY MEDICAL MUSEUM, NOS. 3486, 3487."

The medium looked up with a puzzled expression.

"Good gracious!" said I, "they are my legs! my legs!"

What followed, I ask no one to be lieve except those who, like myself, have communed with the beings of another sphere. Suddenly I felt a strange return of my self-consciousness. I was reindividualized, so to speak. A strange

wonder filled me, and, to the amazement of every one, I arose, and, staggering a little, walked across the room on limbs invisible to them or me. It was no wonder I staggered, for, as I briefly reflected, my legs had been nine months in the strongest alcohol. At this instant all my new friends crowded around me in astonishment. Presently, however, I felt myself sinking slowly. My legs were going, and in a moment I was resting feebly on my two stumps upon the floor. It was too much. All that was left of me fainted and rolled over senseless.

I have little to add. I am now at home in the West, surrounded by every form of kindness, and every possible comfort; but, alas! I have so little surety of being myself, that I doubť my own honesty in drawing my pension, and feel absolved from gratitude to those who are kind to a being who is uncertain of being enough himself to be conscientiously responsible. It is needless to add, that I am not a happy fraction of a man; and that I am eager for the day when I shall rejoin the lost members of my corporeal family in another and a happier world.

ON TRANSLATING THE DIVINA COMMEDIA.

SECOND SONNET.

I

ENTER, and see thee in the gloom

Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine!

And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine.

The air is filled with some unknown perfume;

The congregation of the dead make room

For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine;

Like rooks that haunt Ravenna's groves of pine

The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb.

From the confessionals I hear arise

Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies,

And lamentations from the crypts below;
And then a voice celestial that begins

With the pathetic words, "Although your sins
As scarlet be," and ends with "as the snow."

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-Well, I don't know." Mr. Brwen said. opening the mouth of the horse and looking in it; we at troubles, an if it ain't one mg it's another. Now if John was it sck I s'pose you'd be frettin about somethin eise; you most at think you re parcularly sot apart your affects, A bow. This ran that's genera is gola to spile a couple of acres of grass for me do you see?"

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had brought the umbrella, looked terribly frightened. "They won't let me go over, you know," she said, nodding her head toward the house, "not if it's really small-pox!" And then, with the hope at which the young are so quick to catch, she added, "May be it is n't small-pox. I haven't heard of a case anywhere about. I don't believe it is." And then she told Mrs. Walker not to fret about home. "I will go," she said, "and milk the cow, and look after things. Don't think one thought about it." And then she asked if the rest of them at John Walker's were well.

"If it's Hobert you want to know about," the grandmother said, smiling faintly, "he's well; but, darlin', you'd better not think about him: they'll be ag'in it, in there!" and she nodded toward the house as Jenny had done before her.

The face of the young girl flushed, not with confusion, but with self-asserting and defiant brightness that seemed

to say, "Let them do their worst." The thunder rattled sharper and nearer, bursting right upon the flash of the lightning, and then came the rain. But it proved not one of those bright, brief dashes that leave the world sparkling, but settled toward sunset into a slow, dull drizzle.

Jenny had her milking, and all the other evening chores, done betimes, and with an alertness and cheerfulness in excess of her usual manner, that might have indicated an unusual favor to be asked. She had made her evening toilet; that is, she had combed her hair, tied on a pair of calf-skin shoes, and a blue checked apron, newly washed and ironed; when she said, looking toward a faint light in the west, and as though the thought had just occurred to her, "It's going to break away, I see. Don't you think, mother, I had better just run over to Mrs. Walker's, and milk her cow for her?"

"Go to Miss Walker's!" repeated the mother, as though she were as much outraged as astonished. She was seated in the door, patching, by the waning light, an old pair of mud-spat

tered trousers, her own dress being very old-fashioned, coarse, and scanty,

so scant, in fact, as to reveal the angles of her form with ungraceful definiteness, especially the knees, that were almost suggestive of a skeleton, and now, as she put herself in position, as it were, stood up with inordinate prominence. Her hands were big in the joints, ragged in the nails, and marred all over with the cuts, burns, and scratches of indiscriminate and incessant toil. But her face was, perhaps, the most sadly divested of all womanly charm. It had, in the first place, the deep yellow, lifeless appearance of an old bruise, and was expressive of pain, irritation, and fanatical anxiety.

"Go to Miss Walker's!" she said again, seeing that Jenny was taking down from its peg in the kitchen-wall a woollen cloak that had been hers since she was a little girl, and her mother's before her.

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Yes, mother. You know John Walker is very sick, and Mrs. Walker has been sent for over there. She's very down-hearted about him. He's dangerous, they think; and I thought may be I'd come round that way as I come home, and ask how he was. Don't you think I'd better?"

"I think you had better stay at home and tend to your own business. You'll spile your clothes, and do no good that I can see by traipsin' out in such a storm."

"Why, you would think it was bad for one of our cows to go without milking," Jenny said, "and I suppose Mrs. Walker's cow is a good deal like ours, and she is giving a pailful of milk now."

"How do you know so much about Miss Walker's cow? If you paid more attention to things at home, and less to other folks, you'd be more dutiful.”

"That's true, mother, but would I be any better?"

"Not in your own eyes, child; but your 're so much wiser than your father and me, that words are throwed away on you."

"I promised Mrs. Walker that I would milk for her to-night," Jen

THE GREAT DOCTOR.

A STORY IN TWO PARTS.

PART L

"HELLO! hello! which way now,

Mrs. Walker? It'll rain afore you git there, if you 've got fur to go. Had n't you better stop an' come in till this thunder-shower passes over?"

"Well, no, I reckon not, Mr. Bowen. I'm in a good deal of a hurry. I've been sent for over to John's." And rubbing one finger up and down the horn of her saddle, for she was on horseback, Mrs. Walker added, "Johnny's sick, Mr. Bowen, an' purty bad, I'm afeard." Then she tucked up her skirts, and, gathering up the rein, that had dropped on the neck of her horse, she inquired in a more cheerful tone, "How's all the folks, - Miss Bowen, an' Jinney, an' all?"

By this time the thunder began to growl, and the wind to whirl clouds of dust along the road.

"You'd better hitch your critter under the wood-shed, an' come in a bit. My woman 'll be glad to see you, an' Jinney too, there she is now, at the winder. I'll warrant nobody goes along the big road without her seein' 'em." Mr. Bowen had left the broad kitchen-porch from which he had hallooed to the old woman, and was now walking down the gravelled path, that, between its borders of four-o'clocks and other common flowers, led from the front door to the front gate. "We 're all purty well, I'm obleeged to you," he said, as, reaching the gate, he leaned over it, and turned his cold gray eyes upon the neat legs of the horse, rather than the anxious face of the rider.

"I'm glad to hear you 're well," Mrs. Walker said; "it a'most seems to me that, if I had Johnny the way he was last week, I would n't complain about anything. We think too much of our lile hardships, Mr. Bowen, -a good Ideal too much!" And Mrs. Walker

looked at the clouds, perhaps in the hope that their blackness would frighten the tears away from her eyes. John was her own boy,- forty years old, to be sure, but still a boy to her, — and he was very sick.

"Well, I don't know," Mr. Bowen said, opening the mouth of the horse and looking in it; "we all have our troubles, an' if it ain't one thing it's another. Now if John was n't sick, I s'pose you'd be frettin' about somethin' else; you must n't think you 're particularly sot apart in your afflictions, any how. This rain that 's getherin' is goin' to spile a couple of acres of grass for me, don't you see?"

Mrs. Walker was hurt. Her neighbor had not given her the sympathy she expected; he had not said anything about John one way nor another; had not inquired whether there was anything he could do, nor what the doctor said, nor asked any of those questions that express a kindly solicitude.

"I am sorry about your hay," she answered, "but I must be going."

"Don't want to hurry you; but if you will go, the sooner the better. That thunder-cloud is certain to bust in a few minutes." And Mr. Bowen turned toward the house.

"Wait a minute, Mrs. Walker," called a young voice, full of kindness; "here's my umberell. It'll save your bonnet, any how; and it's a real purty

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