propounded by me to my elders, in the expectation of eliciting satisfactory replies, the old stereotyped response was given,—to wit: Mankind have souls, and these souls live when the body is dead and returned into the dust of the ground; but what the soul was, whence it came, what was its nature, form, shape and size, and whither it went after the loss of its body, I could gain not the slightest information; for every answer given me was as unsatisfactory as would be the Platonic theory to a modern philosopher of the transcendental order.
After a while these repeated failures produced their legitimate fruit; at first, a little doubt crept in, and challenged all I had gathered. It grew apace, and finally settled into a sort of atheism, from which I was happily rescued by my sister Harriet, and the good old Father Verella, a Spanish priest, by whom I was duly baptized and received into the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church, in my native city, New York. How long the connection lasted cannot now be told; but something that occurred disgusted me, and forthwith the Pope had a new foe in my humble person. Years of doubt again succeeded after this relapse, during which the belief in ghosts grew stronger and still more strong. My mind became subject to certain peculiar states,—a sort of raptness, so to express it,—a condition precisely identical with that now claimed by thousands in the land, to be spiritually induced. The supposition that it is so, may be correct, and it may be that this condition is the result of the development of a new sense or faculty in the mind. It matters not which, albeit I am inclined toward the latter hypothesis. In these states to which I became at times subject,
