The parson.  Mandeville is an infidel.  Come, let’s have some music; nothing else will keep him in good humor till lunch-time.

The mistress.  What shall it be?

The parson.  Give us the larghetto from Beethoven’s second symphony.

The Young Lady puts aside her portfolio.  Herbert looks at the young lady.  The Parson composes himself for critical purposes.  Mandeville settles himself in a chair and stretches his long legs nearly into the fire, remarking that music takes the tangles out of him.

After the piece is finished, lunch is announced.  It is still snowing.

FOURTH STUDY

It is difficult to explain the attraction which the uncanny and even the horrible have for most minds.  I have seen a delicate woman half fascinated, but wholly disgusted, by one of the most unseemly of reptiles, vulgarly known as the “blowing viper” of the Alleghanies.  She would look at it, and turn away with irresistible shuddering and the utmost loathing, and yet turn to look at it again and again, only to experience the same spasm of disgust.  In spite of her aversion, she must have relished the sort of electric mental shock that the sight gave her.

I can no more account for the fascination for us of the stories of ghosts and “appearances,” and those weird tales in which the dead are the chief characters; nor tell why we should fall into converse about them when the winter evenings are far spent, the embers are glazing over on the hearth, and the listener begins to hear the eerie noises in the house.  At such times one’s dreams become of importance, and people like to tell them and dwell upon them, as if they were a link between the known and unknown, and could give us a clew to that ghostly region which in certain states of the mind we feel to be more real than that we see.

Recently, when we were, so to say, sitting around the borders of the supernatural late at night, Mandeville related a dream of his which he assured us was true in every particular, and it interested us so much that we asked him to write it out.  In doing so he has curtailed it, and to my mind shorn it of some of its more vivid and picturesque features.  He might have worked it up with more art, and given it a finish which the narration now lacks, but I think best to insert it in its simplicity.  It seems to me that it may properly be called,

A NEW “VISION OF SIN”

In the winter of 1850 I was a member of one of the leading colleges of this country.  I was in moderate circumstances pecuniarily, though I was perhaps better furnished with less fleeting riches than many others.  I was an incessant and indiscriminate reader of books.  For the solid sciences I had no particular fancy, but with mental modes and habits, and especially with the eccentric and fantastic in the intellectual and