All this while we were about Edmond. He soon came to himself, and none but I had any suspicion of the true cause of his fall. I, however, who had seen one of these seizures already, could have no doubt as to the nature of this one. For the rest, thank God! he was not in the least hurt. Before the groom could come back with another carriage, we had time to examine the landslip. The wall to the right, along the new road, is only just built. The workmen had not given it sufficient support. It had broken down, and a vast fragment of rock, which had been displaced to make room for the road, had fallen with it, just at the moment when, but for Edmond's accident, we should all have been passing under it, and must in that case have been infallibly crushed to death.”

CHAPTER V.

EDMOND'S RELIGION.

I NEED add nothing to these extracts. Here, then, is the point to which this unhappy man was come. No matter how strongly he might strive against it, he remained a prey to the mysterious action of a Power unknown to those around him, and incredible to himself.

In vain (his journal proves it) did he endeavor by every means in his power to convince himself of the impossibility of apparitions.

THE HAND was there.

The spectral amethyst still smote him with its violet rays.

Not by exbring it be

Since, if he

Not always. Not when he wished it. pressly exciting his imagination could he fore him. For this he had often tried. succeeded in this (he thought), then the spell would be broken; then he might analyze the nature of the vision, investigate the causes and conditions of it, and rest sure that whatever he was able to evoke by power of will, he should always be able to dismiss by the same power.

Not being able to do this, he hoped to accustom himself to this spectral visitant which he could nei ther summon nor exclude; and he labored to render the thought of it familiar to his mind. Labor lost!

When the last apparition already seemed to him as a half-forgotten dream; when, in the full enjoyment of untroubled health, and the clear consciousness of intellectual power, he might reasonably assume that he had fairly rid himself of a temporary nervous irritability, then, by ways the most unexpected, and ever with increased significance, IT returned.

In the mid-heart of the barbarous battle, in the treacherous solitude of the mountain ambush, had he not seen that hand put aside the gun that was leveled at his head? Among the balmy autumn woods at L, when not the shadow of a cloud in heaven gave omen of the sure destruction to which a hundred paces farther must have brought him, had he not recognized the lurid ring upon the stretched forefinger of that posted arm, imperatively warning him back? And once before, over the chessboard, when he had boasted to his own heart that Juliet could not escape him, had it not crossed his game, and found a means to let him understand that it, the Spectre, would know how to balk him?

Would the thing execute its menace? Would his be always the only eye to see the apparition? Or would it, at some later time, reveal itself also to others? These were the doubts that assailed him. So must he live on.

He had built up for himself an elaborate edifice of internal law, suggested by, and based upon, the analogy of the visible organism of forces acting on external nature. In this system the relations of cause and effect were so close as to admit no place for passivity. Action only was considered capable of consequence.