My Library

D��� was the silence, hushed were our breaths. Quick beat our hearts, tearful were our eyes, for a greater than even Death was in that room on the Boulevart de Luxembourg! Seated in a large office-chair, his limbs stiff and cold with the damps of dissolution; his face paler than the Genius of Consumption; his heart and pulses totally moveless; his eyes wide open, and so upturned that not a speck of aught but the uncolored portions thereof were visible, was my friend. In previous years I had often seen him and hundreds of others in both the mesmeric and odyllic trance—the latter being the very common semi-comatic state into which sensitive persons often pass by the merest effort of volition, and in which they give off such highsounding platitudes and call them philosophy transmitted direct from spirit-land to erring mortals, when the fact is, that the whole phenomena—when not simulated, which is not the case in over nine hundred and ninety cases in each thousand of its display—is but the concurrent action of a diseased body and an abnormal, unhealthy mind, and in many cases