phantom father was watching beside the son’s sick-bed, and filled with agony at beholding the wreck of all the brilliant hopes he had cherished for the boy, thought only of preserving the physical life of that dear body, since the death of the outward form was still for him the death of all he had loved.  He would cling to it, preserve it, re-animate it at any cost.  The spirit had quitted it; it lay before him a corpse.  What, then, did the father do?  With a supreme effort of desire, ineffectual indeed to recall the departed ghost, but potent in its reaction upon himself, he projected his own vitality into his son’s dead body, re-animated it with his own soul, and thus effected the resuscitation for which he had so ardently longed.  So the body you now behold is, indeed, the son’s body, but the soul which animates it is that of the father.  And it is a year since this event occurred.  Such is the real solution of the problem, whose natural effects the physician attributes to the result of disease.  The spirit which now tenants this young man’s form had no knowledge of art when he was so strangely reborn into the world, beyond the mere rudiments of drawing which he had learned while watching his son at work during the previous six years.  What, therefore, seems to the physician to be a painful recovery of previous aptitude, is, in fact, the imperfect endeavour of a novice entering a new and unsuitable career.

“For the father the experience is by no means an unprofitable one.  He would certainly, sooner or later, have resumed existence upon earth in the flesh, and it is as well that his return should be under the actual circumstances.  The study of art upon which he has thus entered is likely to prove to him an excellent means of spiritual education.  By means of it his soul may ascend as it has never yet done; while the habits of the body he now possesses, trained as it is to refined and gentle modes of life, may do much to accomplish the purgation and redemption of its new tenant.  It is far better for the father that this strange event should have occurred, than that he should have remained an earth-bound phantom, unable to realise his own position, or to rise above the affection which chained him to merely worldly things.”

—­Paris, Feb. 21, 1880

XVI.  The Metempsychosis

I was visited last night in my sleep by one whom I presently recognised as the famous Adept and Mystic of the first century of our era, Apollonius of Tyana, called the " Pagan Christ.”  He was clad in a grey linen robe with a hood, like that of a monk, and had a smooth, beardless face, and seemed to be between forty and fifty years of age.  He made himself known to me by asking if I had heard of his lion.* He commenced by speaking of Metempsychosis, concerning which he informed