get afore’; but them letters hadn’t any more sense to ’em, nor so much, as a man could write here without schooling, and I should think that if the letters be all straight, if the folks who wrote ’em had any kind of ambition they’d want to be movin’ back here again.  But as for one person’s having something to do with another any distance off, why, that’s another thing; there ain’t any nonsense about that.  I know it’s true jest as well as I want to,” said the cap’n, warming up.  “I’ll tell ye how I was led to make up my mind about it.  One time I waked a man up out of a sound sleep looking at him, and it set me to thinking.  First, there wasn’t any noise, and then ag’in there wasn’t any touch so he could feel it, and I says to myself, ‘Why couldn’t I ha’ done it the width of two rooms as well as one, and why couldn’t I ha’ done it with my back turned?’ It couldn’t have been the looking so much as the thinking.  And then I car’d it further, and I says, ’Why ain’t a mile as good as a yard? and it’s the thinking that does it,’ says I, ’and we’ve got some faculty or other that we don’t know much about.  We’ve got some way of sending our thought like a bullet goes out of a gun and it hits.  We don’t know nothing except what we see.  And some folks is scared, and some more thinks it is all nonsense and laughs.  But there’s something we haven’t got the hang of.’  It makes me think o’ them little black polliwogs that turns into frogs in the fresh-water puddles in the ma’sh.  There’s a time before their tails drop off and their legs have sprouted out, when they don’t get any use o’ their legs, and I dare say they’re in their way consider’ble; but after they get to be frogs they find out what they’re for without no kind of trouble.  I guess we shall turn these fac’lties to account some time or ’nother.  Seems to me, though, that we might depend on ’em now more than we do.”

The captain was under full sail on what we had heard was his pet subject, and it was a great satisfaction to listen to what he had to say.  It loses a great deal in being written, for the old sailor’s voice and gestures and thorough earnestness all carried no little persuasion.  And it was impossible not to be sure that he knew more than people usually do about these mysteries in which he delighted.

“Now, how can you account for this?” said he.  “I remember not more than ten years ago my son’s wife was stopping at our house, and she had left her child at home while she come away for a rest.  And after she had been there two or three days, one morning she was sitting in the kitchen ‘long o’ the folks, and all of a sudden she jumped out of her chair and ran into the bedroom, and next minute she come out laughing, and looking kind of scared.  ‘I could ha’ taken my oath,’ says she,’that I heard Katy cryin’ out mother,’ says she, ’just as if she was hurt.  I heard it so plain that before I stopped to think it seemed as if she were right in the next room.  I’m afeard something