it was the same he had had in the night), "I fix my thoughts and
concentrate my will upon the person whose heart I wish to read, and I
swing the glass to and fro, observing certain prescribed oscillations,
known only to myself. Presently little bubbles begin to move up and
down in the water, throwing reflections, something like the back of a
looking-glass, and by-and-by, as I look at them, I seem to see, as it
were, my own inner spirit reflected in them, perceptibly and legibly,
although a higher consciousness recognizes the image and its reflection
as that of the person upon whom I am exerting my will. Often, when the
propinquity of a stranger, as yet uninvestigated, makes me over anxious
and uneasy, it chances that I make an experiment in the night; and I
presume this was the case last night; for I can assure you you caused
me no little uneasiness yesterday evening. Oh! my dear, dear neighbour,
surely I can't be wrong, surely I'm not making a mistake here: you and
I spent many happy days together in Ceylon, just as nearly as possible
two hundred years ago? Did we not?"

"'Then he got into all sorts of labyrinths of incoherence, and I saw
well enough whom I had to do with, and got away from him as quickly as
I could, though not without some difficulty.

"'When I asked the landlady about him, I found that my neighbour, who
had long been a much esteemed savant and man of business, with much
many-sided cultivation, had a short time before fallen into a profound
_maliconia_, in which he believed that everybody was inimically
disposed to him and wanted to do him some harm; till all at once he
thought he had discovered the means of finding out those who were his
enemies and were hostile to him; upon which he had passed into his
present tranquil and contented condition of madness with "fixed idea."
It seems he sits nearly all day at his window making experiments with
his glass. His own kindly disposition is seen in the circumstance that
he nearly always augurs well of the people whom he experiments upon,
and when he comes across anybody whom he thinks inimical, or dubious,
he is not angry, but droops into a state of quiet sadness. So that his
madness is quite harmless, and his elder brother, who manages his
affairs, can let him live wherever he chooses, and has no occasion to
give himself any trouble about him.'

"'So that your ghost,' said Severin, 'belongs to the category of those
in Wagner's "Book of Apparitions," inas