Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/60

Curiosity is the soul of advancement; it is a female element almost exclusively; and though all else forsake woman, curiosity never will, either on earth or anywhere else. It prompted me to the investigations above recounted, and to others which followed hard thereon. I wondered how my feet and ankles looked! The desire was no sooner formed than gratified. The latter were encased in proper attire, but the former not quite so, for instead of a shoe, as I expected to find, there was only a sort of sandal,—a mere sole, light and graceful, fitting perfectly, and seemingly kept in place by narrow red bands, which were laced to the ankles and over the foot and instep. The bands themselves seemed to be of a material no coarser than cords of braided light. Such, in brief, were the revealments of the mirror. "Mirror!" exclaims the reader, "why mirrors are adapted only to solar light, and that which proceeds from material combustion. They reflect from their polished surfaces, according to the well-known laws of optics, which laws cannot possibly obtain of the strange world of which you were then an occupant,—which realm lies above and beyond the sphere of their action or influence; how then could you see the image of yourself?" Again: "If the first suit of apparel in which you found yourself after death, were only mere appearances, of what nature or character were these last? If the spirit of a human being is, as we are led to infer from your narrative, in nowise physical, or even hyper-physical, as the Spiritualists assert—and they claim to know all about the matter,—if it is only a phantasmal projection from the very soul,—an out-attachment of the supreme self, how do