friend and a very dear companion to
her.

There were some curious spiritual experiences connected with his last
evening's adventure which were working very strongly in his mind. It was
borne in upon him irresistibly that he had been dead since he had seen
Helen,--as dead as the son of the Widow of Nain before the bier was
touched and he sat up and began to speak. There was an interval between
two conscious moments which appeared to him like a temporary
annihilation, and the thoughts it suggested were worrying him with
strange perplexities.

He remembered seeing the dark figure on horseback rise in the saddle and
something leap from its hand. He remembered the thrill he felt as the
coil settled on his shoulders, and the sudden impulse which led him to
fire as he did. With the report of the pistol all became blank, until he
found himself in a strange, bewildered state, groping about for the
weapon, which he had a vague consciousness of having dropped. But,
according to Abel's account, there must have been an interval of some
minutes between these recollections, and he could not help asking, Where
was the mind, the soul, the thinking principle, all this time?

A man is stunned by a blow with a stick on the head. He becomes
unconscious. Another man gets a harder blow on the head from a bigger
stick, and it kills him. Does he become unconscious, too? If so, when
does he come to his consciousness? The man who has had a slight or
moderate blow comes to himself when the immediate shock passes off and
the organs begin to work again, or when a bit of the skull is pried up,
if that happens to be broken. Suppose the blow is hard enough to spoil
the brain and stop the play of the organs, what happens them?

A British captain was struck by a cannon-ball on the head, just as he was
giving an order, at the Battle of the Nile. Fifteen months afterwards he
was trephined at Greenwich Hospital, having been insensible all that
time. Immediately after the operation his consciousness returned, and he
at once began carrying out the order he was giving when the shot struck
him. Suppose he had never been trephined, when would his consciousness
have returned? When his breath ceased and his heart stopped beating?

When Mr. Bernard said to Helen, "I have been dead since I saw you," it
startled her not a little; for his expression was that of perfect good
faith, and she feared that his mind was disordered. When he explained,
not