And then she murmured to herself:  “Yes, it has been darling Annie’s only fault; she has always been too religious.”  Methinks that, as the world judges, the dying voice spake truly, and the dying eyes saw with a real insight.  For though I was then kneeling beside her bed, heretic and outcast, the heart of me was religious in its very fervour of repudiation of a religion, and in its rebellious uprising against dogmas that crushed the reason and did not satisfy the soul.  I went out into the darkness alone, not because religion was too good for me, but because it was not good enough; it was too meagre, too commonplace, too little exacting, too bound up with earthly interests, too calculating in its accommodations to social conventionalities.  The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.

For as a child I was mystical and imaginative religious to the very finger-tips, and with a certain faculty for seeing visions and dreaming dreams.  This faculty is not uncommon with the Keltic races, and makes them seem “superstitious” to more solidly-built peoples.  Thus, on the day of my father’s funeral, my mother sat with vacant eyes and fixed pallid face—­the picture comes back to me yet, it so impressed my childish imagination—­following the funeral service, stage after stage, and suddenly, with the words, “It is all over!” fell back fainting.  She said afterwards that she had followed the hearse, had attended the service, had walked behind the coffin to the grave.  Certain it is that a few weeks later she determined to go to the Kensal Green Cemetery, where the body of her husband had been laid, and went thither with a relative; he failed to find the grave, and while another of the party went in search of an official to identify the spot, my mother said, “If you will take me to the chapel where the first part of the service was read, I will find the grave.”  The idea seemed to her friend, of course, to be absurd; but he would not cross the newly-made widow, so took her to the chapel.  She looked round, left the chapel door, and followed the path along which the corpse had been borne till she reached the grave, where she was quietly standing when the caretaker arrived to point it out.  The grave is at some distance from the chapel, and is not on one of the main roads; it had nothing on it to mark it, save the wooden peg with the number, and this would be no help to identification at a distance since all the graves are thus marked, and at a little way off these pegs are not visible.  How she found the grave remained a mystery in the family, as no one believed her straightforward story that she had been present at the funeral.  With my present knowledge the matter is simple enough, for I now know that the consciousness can leave the body, take part in events going on at a distance, and,