Lord!" fifty times a day, and as often in the night begs God to have mercy upon his rack-tortured jaws. The fact is there never yet was, there never will be, such a rara avis as a genuine atheist; and in spite of all protestations to the contrary, there are but few who do not believe to some extent in the existence of spirits. As with the rest of the world, so with myself; for, notwithstanding the chronic and hereditary scepticism of my nature, a scepticism as unbending as iron, as inflexible as stone, I, from early childhood, entertained a certain vague, indefinite belief in the existence of the spectral gentry of another world; yet with this belief there was not the least realization in my mind that the objects of my belief had the faintest or most distant relationship to the human people in flesh and blood whom I daily saw about me. There was nothing very singular in that, however, for I merely resembled the millions of to-day, who, while entertaining the most undoubted, and, in some respects, salutary belief in ghosts, yet practically seem not to have the most distant idea that in so doing they are fully accepting the mystic's faith,—that these self-same ghosts are but the spirits of mortals who dwell beyond the veil.
Even in my early days I strove, by inquiry and by reading such books upon the subject as fell in my way, to find out whether this earthly life was the only allotment of man,—poor, care-ridden, unhappy man,—or not. Child as I was, I felt the incompleteness of all subsolary things, and longed to know if our experiences here were or were not all we had to hope for, or look forward to. The belief in ghosts did not help me any; for that ghost and spirit were synonyms, never once struck my mind. To the innumerable questions
