By degrees I learned that the Doctor was deeply interested in what we would call speculative philosophy.  I say by degrees, for the experience I am now writing down embraces the winters of five or six years.  Most of the books that composed his library were abstruse treatises on metaphysics, philosophy, and religion.  I believe that in his collection could have been found the Bible of every religious faith.  Sometimes he would read aloud a passage in the Bhagavadgita, of which he had a manuscript copy interleaved with annotations in his own delicate handwriting.

He seldom spoke of the past, but he seemed strangely interested in the political condition of every civilized nation.  The future of the human race was a subject to which he undoubtedly gave much thought.  I have heard him more than once declare, with emphasis, that the outlook for the advancement of America was not auspicious.  In regard to the sectional discord in the United States, he showed a strange unconcern.  I knew that he believed it a matter of indifference whether secession, of which we were beginning again to hear some mutterings, was a constitutional right; but on the question of slavery his interest was intense.  He believed that slavery could not endure, let secession be attempted or abandoned, let secession fail or succeed.

In my vacations I spoke to my father of the profound man who had interested himself in my mental welfare; my father approved the intimacy.  He did not know Dr. Khayme personally, but he had much reason to believe him a worthy man.  I had never said anything to my father about the note he had written to the Doctor; for a long time, in fact, the thought of doing so did not come to me, and when it did come I decided that, since my father had not mentioned the matter, it was not for me to do so; it was a peculiar note.

My father gave me to know that his former wish to abridge my life in the South had given way to his fears, and that I was to continue to spend my winters in Charleston.  In after years I learned that Dr. Khayme had not thought my condition exempt from danger.

So had passed the winters and vacations until the fall of ’57, without recurrence of my trouble.  I no longer feared a lapse; my father and the physicians agreed that my migrations should cease, and I entered college.  I wrote Dr. Khayme a letter, in which I expressed great regret on account of our separation, but I received no reply.

On Christmas Day of this year, 1857, I was at home.  Suddenly, even without the least premonition or obvious cause, I suffered lapse of memory.  The period affected embraced, with remarkable exactness, all the time that had elapsed since I had last seen Dr. Khayme.

Early in January my father accompanied me to Charleston.  He was induced to take me there because I was conscious of nothing that had happened since the last day I spent there, and he was, moreover, very anxious to meet Dr. Khayme.  We learned, on our arrival in Charleston, however, that the Doctor and his daughter had sailed for Liverpool early in September.  My father and I travelled in the South until November, 1858, when my memory was completely restored.  He then returned to Massachusetts, leaving me in Carolina, and I did not return to the North until August, 1860.