to have entirely left him; he was no longer master of his pencil; his former faculty and promise of excellence had vanished.  The physician who had attended him during his illness affirmed that all this was readily accounted for by the assumption that the malaria had affected the cerebral centres, and in particular, the nerve-cells of the memory; that such consequences of severe continuous fever were by no means uncommon, and might last for an indefinite period.  Meanwhile the young man was now, by slow and painful application, doing his utmost to recover his lost power and skill.  Naturally, the subject was distasteful to him, and he shrank from discussing it.  Here the voice again spoke to me through the tube, telling me to observe the young man, and especially his face.  On this I scanned his countenance with attention, and remarked that it wore a singularly odd look,—­the look of a man advanced in years and experience.  But that I surmised to be a not unusual effect of severe fever.

“How old do you suppose the patient to be?” asked the interrogative voice.

“About twenty years old, I suppose,” said I.

“He is a year old,” rejoined the voice.

“A year!  How can that be?”

“If you will not allow that he is only a year old, then you must admit that he is sixty-five, for he is certainly either one or the other.”

This enigma so perplexed me, that I begged my invisible informant for a solution of the difficulty, which was at once vouchsafed in the following terms:—­

“Here is the history of your patient.  The youth who was the proficient and gifted student, who astonished his masters, and gave such brilliant indications of future greatness, is dead.  The malaria killed him.  But he had a father, who, while alive, had loved his son as the apple of his eye, and whose whole being and desire centred in the boy.  This father died some six years ago, about the age of sixty.  After his death his devotion to the youth continued, and as a “spirit,” he followed him everywhere, never quitting his side.  So entirely was he absorbed in the lad and in his career, that he made no advance in his own spiritual life, nor, indeed, was he fully aware of the fact that he had himself quitted the earthly plane.  For there are souls which, having been obtuse and dull in their apprehension of spiritual things during their existence in the flesh, and having neither hopes nor aims beyond the body, are very slow to realise the fact of their dissolution, and remain, therefore, chained to the earth by earthly affections and interests, haunting the places or persons they have most affected.  But the young artist was not of this order.  Idealist and genius, he was already highly spiritualised and vitalised even upon earth, and when death rent the bond between him and his body, he passed at once from the atmosphere of carnal things into a loftier sphere.  But at the moment of his death, the