as a man without kindred, without home, and now I come to you and ask for both."

"Lilian ;" and Lilian's lips moved, but I did not hear her answer. Her mother did. She took Lilian's hand, Mrs. Ashleigh looked at me be- simply placed it in mine, and said, nignly, then raised her daughter's "As she chooses, I choose; whom face from her lap, and whispered, she loves, I love.”

CHAPTER XIX.

borne, unflinching and contented, whatever the world considers to be sacrifice and privation,-yet I should never have expected her to take her share in the troubles of ordinary life. I could never have applied to her the homely but significant name of helpmate. I reproach myself while I write for noticing such defect-if defect it were-in what may be called the practical routine of our positive, trivial, human existence. No doubt it was this that had caused Mrs. Poyntz's harsh judgment against the wisdom of my choice. But such chiller shade upon Lilian's charming nature was reflected from no inert, unamiable self-love. It was but the consequence of that self-absorption which the habit of reverie had fostered. I cautiously abstained from all allusion to those visionary deceptions, which she had confided to me as the truthful impressions of spirit, if not of sense. To me any approach to what I termed superstition was displeasing; any indulgence of phantasies not within the measured and

FROM that evening till the day Mrs. | that her love for me was deep and Ashleigh and Lilian went on the truthful; it was clearly void of all dreaded visit, I was always at their ambition; doubtless she would have house, when my avocations allowed me to steal to it; and during those few days, the happiest I had ever known, it seemed to me that years could not have more deepened my intimacy with Lilian's exquisite nature-made me more reverential of its purity, or more enamoured of its sweetness. I could detect in her but one fault, and I rebuked myself for believing that it was a fault. We see many who neglect the minor duties of life, who lack watchful forethought and considerate care for others, and we recognise the cause of this failing in levity or egotism. Certainly, neither of those tendencies of character could be ascribed to Lilian. Yet still in daily trifles there was something of that neglect, some lack of that care and forethought. She loved her mother with fondness and devotion, yet it never occurred to her to aid in those petty household cares in which her mother centred so much of habitual interest. She was full of tenderness and pity to all want and suffering, yet many a young lady on the Hill was more actively beneficent-visit-beaten tracks of healthful imaginaing the poor in their sickness, or instructing their children in the Infant Schools. I was persuaded

tion, more than displeased me in her-it alarmed. I would not by a word encourage her in persuasions

which I felt it would be at present our engagement should be, for the premature to reason against, and present, confided only to Mrs. cruel indeed to ridicule. I was Poyntz. When Mrs. Ashleigh and convinced that of themselves these Lilian returned, which would be in mists round her native intelligence, a few weeks at furthest, it should be engendered by a solitary and musing proclaimed; and our marriage could childhood, would subside in the take place in the autumn, when I fuller daylight of wedded life. She should be most free for a brief holiseemed pained when she saw how day from professional toils. resolutely I shunned a subject dear to her thoughts. She made one or two timid attempts to renew it, but my grave looks sufficed to check her. Once or twice indeed, on such occasions, she would turn away and leave me, but she soon came back; that gentle heart could not bear one unkindlier shade between itself and what it loved. It was agreed that

So we parted-as lovers part. I felt none of those jealous fears which, before we were affianced, had made me tremble at the thought of separation, and had conjured up irresistible rivals. But it was with a settled heavy gloom that I saw her depart. From earth was gone a glory; from life a blessing!

CHAPTER XX.

or counterbalancing that in which it superabounds-a theory upon which some eminent physicians have more recently improved with signal success.

DURING the busy years of my professional career, I had snatched leisure for some professional treatises, which had made more or less sensation, and one of them entitled But on these essays, slight The Vital Principle; its Waste and and suggestive, rather than dogSupply, had gained a wide circula-matic, I set no value. I had been tion among the general public. This last treatise contained the results of certain experiments, then new in chemistry, which were adduced in support of a theory I entertained as to the reinvigoration of the human system by principles similar to those which Liebig has applied to the replenishment of an exhausted soil --viz., the giving back to the frame those essentials to its nutrition, which it has lost by the action or accident of time; or supplying that special pabulum or energy in which the individual organism is constitutionally deficient; and neutralizing

for the last two years engaged on a work of much wider range, endeared to me by a far bolder ambition-a work upon which I fondly hoped to found an enduring reputation as a severe and original physiologist. It was an Inquiry into Organic Life, similar in comprehensiveness of survey to that by which the illustrious Müller, of Berlin, has enriched the science of our age; however inferior, alas! to that august combination of thought and learning, in the judgment which checks presumption, and the genius which adorns speculation. But at

that day I was carried away by the ardour of composition, and I admired my performance because I loved my labour. This work had been entirely laid aside for the last agitated month: now that Lilian was gone, I resumed it earnestly, as the sole occupation that had power and charm enough to rouse me from the aching sense of void and loss.

an indignant "No!" A "Yes" would have shaken my creed of materialism to the dust. I wrote on rapidly, warmly. I defined the properties and meted the limits of natural laws, which I would not admit that a Deity himself could alter. I clamped and soldered dogma to dogma in the links of my tinkered logic, till out from my page, to my The very night of the day she own complacent eye, grew Intellecwent, I reopened my MS. I had left tual Man, as the pure formation of off at the commencement of a chap- his material senses; mind, or what is ter" Upon Knowledge as derived called soul, born from and nurtured from our Senses." As my convic- by them alone; through them to tions on this head were founded on act, and to perish with the machine the well-known arguments of Locke they moved. Strange, that at the and Condillac against innate ideas, very time my love for Lilian might and on the reasonings by which have taught me that there are mysHume has resolved the combination teries in the core of the feelings of sensations into a general idea to which my analysis of ideas could not an impulse arising merely out of solve, I should so stubbornly have habit, so I set myself to oppose, as a opposed as unreal all that could be dangerous concession to the senti- referred to the spiritual! Strange, mentalities or mysticism of a pseudo- that at the very time when the philosophy, the doctrine favoured thought that I might lose from this by most of our recent physiologists, life the being I had known scarce a and of which some of the most emi-month, had just before so appalled nent of German metaphysicians have accepted the substance, though refining into a subtlety its positive form-I mean the doctrine which Müller himself has expressed in these words:

"That innate ideas may exist, cannot in the slightest degree be denied; it is, indeed, a fact. All the ideas of animals, which are induced by instinct, are innate and immediate something presented to the mind, a desire to attain which is at the same time given. The new-born lamb and foal have such innate ideas, which lead them to follow their mother and suck the teats. Is it not in some measure the same with the intellectual ideas of man ?"*

To this question I answered with

me, I should thus complacently sit down to prove that, according to the laws of the nature which my passion obeyed, I must lose for eternity the blessing I now hoped I had won to my life! But how distinctly dissimilar is man in his conduct from man in his systems! See the poet reclined under forest-boughs, conning odes to his mistress; follow him out into the world; no mistress ever lived for him there!* See the hard man of science, so austere in his passionless problems; follow him now where the brain rests from its toil, where the heart finds its Sabbath-what child is so tender, so yielding and soft?

* Cowley, who wrote so elaborate a series of amatory poems, is said "never

to have been in love but once, and then * Müller's Elements of Physiology, he never had resolution to tell his passion." vol. ii., p. 134. Translated by Dr. Baley.-Johnson's Lives of the Poets: COWLEY.

But I had proved to my own satis- I muttered to myself. "And here faction that poet and sage are dust, is an anecdote at my own expense and no more, when the pulse ceases (as Müller frankly tells us anecdotes to beat. And on that consolatory of the illusions which would haunt conclusion my pen stopped. his eyes, shut or open)-an anecdote I may quote when I come to my Chapter on the Cheats of the Senses and Spectral Phantasms." I went on with my book, and wrote till the lights waned in the grey of the dawn. And I said then, in the triumph of my pride, as I laid myself down to rest, "I have written that which allots with precision man's place in the region of nature; written that which will found a school-form disciples; and race after race of those who cultivate truth through pure reason, shall accept my bases if they enlarge my building." And again I heard the sigh, but this time it caused no surprise. Certainly," I murmured, "a very strange thing is the nervous system!" So I turned on my pillow, and, wearied out, fell asleep.

Suddenly, beside me I distinctly heard a sigh-a compassionate, mournful sigh. The sound was unmistakeable. I started from my seat, looked round, amazed to discover no one-no living thing! The windows were closed, the night was still. That sigh was not the wail of the wind. But there, in the darker angle of the room, what was that? A silvery whiteness-vaguely shaped as a human form-receding, fading, gone! Why, I know not-for no face was visible, no form, if form it were, more distinct than the colourless outline;-why, I know not, but I cried aloud, "Lilian! Lilian!" My voice came strangely back to my own ear-I paused, then smiled and blushed at my folly. "So I, too, have learned what is superstition,"

CHAPTER XXI.

THE next day, the last of the visiting | urgent. I went on horseback, and patients to whom my forenoons were rode fast; but swiftly as I cantered devoted, had just quitted me, when through the village that skirted the I was summoned in haste to attend the steward of a Sir Philip Derval, not residing at his family seat, which was about five miles from L-. It was rarely indeed that persons so far from the town, when of no higher rank than this applicant, asked my services. But it was my principle to go wherever I was summoned; my profession was not gain, it was healing, to which gain was the incident, not the essential. This case the messenger reported as

approach to Sir Philip Derval's park, the evident care bestowed on the accommodation of the cottagers forcibly struck me. I felt that I was on the lands of a rich, intelligent, and beneficent proprietor. Entering the park, and passing before the manor-house, the contrast between the neglect and decay of the absentee's stately hall and the smiling homes of his villagers was disconsolately mournful.

An imposing pile, built apparently

habits of life. These seemed sufficiently regular; I could discover no apparent cause for the attack, which

my experience. "Has your husband
ever had such fits before ?"
"Never!"

"Had he experienced any sudden emotion? Had he heard any unexpected news? or had anything happened to put him out?"

by Vanbrugh, with decorated pil- | husband's ordinary regimen and asters, pompous portico, and grand perron (or double flight of stairs to the entrance), enriched with urns and statues, but discoloured, mil-presented symptoms not familiar to dewed, chipped, half-hidden with unpruned creepers and ivy. Most of the windows were closed with shutters, decaying for want of paint; in some of the casements the panes were broken; the peacock perched on the shattered balustrade, that fenced a garden overgrown with weeds. The sun glared hotly on the place, and made its ruinous condition still more painfully apparent. I was glad when a winding in the park-road shut the house from my sight. Suddenly I emerged through a copse of ancient yew-trees, and before me there gleamed, in abrupt whiteness, a building evidently designed for the family mausoleumclassical in its outline, with the blind iron door niched into stone walls of massive thickness, and surrounded by a funereal garden of roses and evergreens, fenced with an iron rail, parti-gilt.

The suddenness with which this House of the Dead came upon me heightened almost into pain, if not into awe, the dismal impression which the aspect of the deserted home in its neighbourhood had made. I spurred my horse and soon arrived at the door of my patient, who lived in a fair brick house at the other extremity of the park.

I found my patient, a man somewhat advanced in years, but of a robust conformation, in bed: he had been seized with a fit, which was supposed to be apoplectic, a few hours before; but was already sensible, and out of immediate danger. After I had prescribed a few simple remedies, I took aside the patient's wife, and went with her to the parlour below stairs, to make some inquiry about her

The woman looked much disturbed at these inquiries. I pressed them more urgently. At last she burst into tears, and clasping my hand, said, "Oh! doctor, I ought to tell you-I sent for you on purpose

yet I fear you will not believe me: my good man has seen a ghost!"

"A ghost!" said I, repressing a smile. "Well, tell me all, that I may prevent the ghost coming again."

The woman's story was prolix. Its substance was this: Her husband, habitually an early riser, had left his bed that morning still earlier than usual, to give directions about some cattle that were to be sent for sale to a neighbouring fair. An hour afterwards he had been found by a shepherd, near the mausoleum, apparently lifeless. On being removed to his own house, he had recovered speech, and bidding all except his wife leave the room, he then told her that on walking across the park towards the cattlesheds, he had seen, what appeared to him at first, a pale light by the iron door of the mausoleum. On approaching nearer, this light changed into the distinct and visible form of his master, Sir Philip Derval, who was then abroad-supposed to be in the East, where he had resided for many years. The impression on the steward's mind was so strong, that he called out,