antipathetic to our own nature; and from a knowledge of which, we are happily secured by the imperfection of our senses."
"You are a believer in spirits, then?" said Mervale, with an incredulous smile.
"Nay, it was not precisely of spirits that I spoke; but there may be forms of matter as invisible and impalpable to us as the animalculæ in the air we breathe — in the water that plays in yonder basin. Such beings may have passions and powers like our own — as the animalculæ to which I have compared them. The monster that lives and dies in a drop of water — carnivorous, insatiable, subsisting on the creatures minuter than himself — is not less deadly in his wrath, less ferocious in his nature, than the tiger of the. desert. There may be things around us that would be dangerous and hostile to men, if Providence had not placed a wall between them and us, merely by different modifications of matter."
And think you that wall never can be removed?" asked young Glyndon, abruptly. "Are the traditions of sorcerer and wizard, universal and immemorial as they are, merely fables?"
"Perhaps yes — perhaps no," answered the stranger, indifferently. "But who, in an age in which the reason has chosen its proper bounds, would be mad enough to break the partition that divides him from the boa and the lion — to repine at and rebel against the law which confines the shark to the great deep? Enough of these idle speculations."
