This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
DEALINGS WITH THE DEAD
171

of what they were pleased to call clairvoyance). While sojourning in this eastern city, I came across a series of crayon sketches, copied from an old English work by their possessor, illustrative of certain portions of the processes of cosmical formation, according to the Ignigenous Theory. One of these drawings represented a vortical sun, discharging from itself countless hosts of lesser suns—a world-rain from the eternal cornucopia. The idea, even if it be but an idea, is a magnificent—aye, a tremendous one, and it attracted my soul very strongly. Many and many an hour have I sat gazing raptly upon that bit of pasteboard, which to me told a story too supremely vast and grand to ever find expression in human types or language; and often have I been lost in the lanes of the azure, when striving to reach that almighty center of flaming fire, whence starry systems rain down like snow-flakes in the wintry days.

This particular crayon set me to thinking in right good earnest; as a result of which, it appeared that my psychical vision became intensified. Test after test was given of this power, until the list rolled up from tens to hundreds, and people said, "If these descriptions of dead persons, whom you have never seen when living, and whom you profess to behold now, are not proofs of both the immortality of the soul and the ability to scale the walls which divide this from the upper worlds, what in Heaven's name will prove them? It must be true that you, and hundreds of others as well, do really penetrate the heretofore unlifted veil." The display of these powers satisfied others, but to myself they still remained the weary, weary A's and the barren, barren B's; for, notwithstanding all that I had seen, heard and read on the subject of the soul's continuance, it was