he
shoulders, and was handsomer than any one you ever saw; she looked about
thirty." And when I asked if she had seen others like her, she said, "Some
of them have their hair down, but they look quite different, more like the
sleepy-looking ladies one sees in the papers. Those with their hair up are
like this one. The others have long white dresses, but those with their
hair up have short dresses, so that you can see their legs right up to
the calf." And when I questioned her, I found that they wore what might
well be some kind of buskin. "They are fine and dashing-looking, like the
men one sees riding their horses in twos and threes on the slopes of the
mountains with their swords swinging. There is no such race living now,
none so finely proportioned ... When I think of her and the ladies now
they are like little children running about not knowing how to put their
clothes on right ... why, I would not call them women at all."

Not at this time, but some three or four years later, when the visions
came without any conscious use of symbol for a short time, and with much
greater vividness, I saw two or three forms of this incredible beauty, one
especially that must always haunt my memory. Then, too, the Master Pilot
told us of meeting at night close to the Pilot House a procession of women
in what seemed the costume of another age. Were they really people of the
past, revisiting, perhaps, the places where they lived, or must I explain
them, as I explained that vision of Eden as a mountain garden, by some
memory of the race, as distinct from individual memory? Certainly these
Spirits, as the country people called them, seemed full of personality;
were they not capricious, generous, spiteful, anxious, angry, and yet did
that prove them more than images and symbols? When I used a combined earth
and fire and lunar symbol, my seer, a girl of twenty-five, saw an obvious
Diana and her dogs, about a fire in a cavern. Presently, judging from her
closed eyes, and from the tone of her voice, that she was in trance, not
in reverie, I wished to lighten the trance a little, and made through
carelessness or hasty thinking a symbol of dismissal; and at once she
started and cried out, "She says you are driving her away too quickly. You
have made her angry." Then, too, if my visions had a subjective element,
so had Mary Battle's, for her fairies had but one tune, _The Distant
Waterfall_, and she never heard anything described in a sermon at