s house, as mysteriously as
he went, and was welcomed as one risen from the dead. I am that George
Snyder, and propose to give now a brief account of that strange going
and coming. Since April last I have been engaged, as well as the
excitement of listening to the narrative of the great events which had
taken place in my native land during my absence would allow me, in
preparing for publication a history of my observations, made during the
six years' absence; but of this history I can now give merely an
outline.

On the night of my departure, November 5, 1858, I was sitting in my own
room, studying Gauss's "Theoria Motus"; and, as was often the case with
me, I grew so absorbed in the study as to lose all consciousness of
outward things beyond the limits of the single page before me. I had
forgotten the time of night,--nay, I could not have recalled the time of
my life, whether I was in college or had graduated, whether I had
entered on my profession or was preparing for it. My loss of the sense
of space was as absolute as my loss of the sense of time, and I could
not have said whether I was in my father's house in New York, or in my
room in Wentworth Hall, or in my office in Jersey City. I only knew that
the page, illuminated by a drop gas-light, was before me, and on it the
record of that brilliant triumph of the human intellect, the deduction
of a planet's entire orbit from observations of its position.

As I sat thus absorbed, my attention was partially diverted by a slight
tapping, as if upon the very table upon which my book was resting.
Without raising my eyes from the page, I allowed my thoughts to wander,
as I inquired within myself what could have produced the noise. Could it
be that I was thus suddenly "developed as a medium," and that the spirit
of some departed friend wished to communicate with me? I rejected the
thought instantly, for I was no believer in modern necromancy. But no
sooner had I mentally decided that this was not the true explanation
than I began to feel my right hand tremble in an unnatural manner, and
my fingers close against my will around a pencil which I had been
loosely holding. Then suddenly, upon the paper on which I
had been occasionally filling out the omitted links in Gauss's
mathematical reasoning, my hand, against my will, legibly scrawled,
"_Copernicus_,"--upon which a renewed tapping was heard upon the table.
I sprang out of my chair, as one startled out of sleep, and looked a