The Atlantic Monthly | Page 9

a pale face, light eyes of a washed-out blue
tint, and very sparse yellow whiskers. His mouth was weak, both lips
being almost alike, so that the organ might have been turned upside
down without affecting its expression. His forehead, however, was high
and thinly covered with sandy hair. I should have said, as a
phrenologist, Will feeble,--emotional, but not passionate,--likely to be
enthusiast, or weakly bigot.
I caught enough of what passed to make me call to the sergeant when
the chaplain left him.
"Good morning," said he. "How do you get on?"
"Not at all," I replied. "Where were you hit?"
"O, at Chancellorsville. I was shot in the shoulder. I have what the
doctors call paralysis of the median nerve, but I guess Dr. Neek and the
lightnin' battery will fix it in time. When my time's out I'll go back to
Kearsage and try on the school-teaching again. I was a fool to leave it."
"Well," said I, "you're better off than I."

"Yes," he answered, "in more ways than one. I belong to the New
Church. It's a great comfort for a plain man like me, when he's weary
and sick, to be able to turn away from earthly things, and hold converse
daily with the great and good who have left the world. We have a circle
in Coates Street. If it wa'n't for the comfort I get there, I should have
wished myself dead many a time. I ain't got kith or kin on earth; but
this matters little, when one can talk to them daily, and know that they
are in the spheres above us."
"It must be a great comfort," I replied, "if only one could believe it."
"Believe!" he repeated, "how can you help it? Do you suppose anything
dies?"
"No," I said. "The soul does not, I am sure; and as to matter, it merely
changes form."
"But why then," said he, "should not the dead soul talk to the living. In
space, no doubt, exist all forms of matter, merely in finer, more ethereal
being. You can't suppose a naked soul moving about without a bodily
garment. No creed teaches that, and if its new clothing be of like
substance to ours, only of ethereal fineness,--a more delicate
recrystallization about the eternal spiritual nucleus,--must not it then
possess powers as much more delicate and refined as is the new
material in which it is reclad?"
"Not very clear," I answered; "but after all, the thing should be
susceptible of some form of proof to our present senses."
"And so it is," said he. "Come to-morrow with me, and you shall see
and hear for yourself."
"I will," said I, "if the doctor will lend me the ambulance."
It was so arranged, as the surgeon in charge was kind enough, as usual,
to oblige me with the loan of his wagon, and two orderlies to lift my
useless trunk.

On the day following, I found myself, with my new comrade, in a
house in Coates Street, where a "circle" was in the daily habit of
meeting. So soon as I had been comfortably deposited in an arm-chair,
beside a large pine-table, the rest of those assembled seated themselves,
and for some time preserved an unbroken silence. During this pause I
scrutinized the persons present. Next to me, on my right, sat a flabby
man, with ill-marked, baggy features, and injected eyes. He was, as I
learned afterwards, an eclectic doctor, who had tried his hand at
medicine and several of its quackish variations, finally settling down on
eclecticism, which I believe professes to be to scientific medicine what
vegetarianism is to common sense, every-day dietetics. Next to him sat
a female,--authoress, I think, of two somewhat feeble novels, and much
pleasanter to look at than her books. She was, I thought, a good deal
excited 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 side-whiskers,--a shrewd-visaged,
large-nosed, 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