were equally willing to be of service,
and equally ignorant of what they were to do. Fortunately, my medical
education made me competent to direct them. A good fire, warm blankets,
hot water in bottles, were all at my disposal. I showed the women myself
how to ply the work of revival. They persevered, and I persevered; and
still there she lay, in her perfect beauty of form, without a sign of
life perceptible; there she lay, to all outward appearance, dead by
drowning.

A last hope was left--the hope of restoring her (if I could construct
the apparatus in time) by the process called "artificial respiration."
I was just endeavoring to tell the landlady what I wanted and was just
conscious o f a strange difficulty in expressing myself, when the good
woman started back, and looked at me with a scream of terror.

"Good God, sir, you're bleeding!" she cried. "What's the matter? Where
are you hurt?"

In the moment when she spoke to me I knew what had happened. The old
Indian wound (irritated, doubtless, by the violent exertion that I had
imposed on myself) had opened again. I struggled against the sudden
sense of faintness that seized on me; I tried to tell the people of the
inn what to do. It was useless. I dropped to my knees; my head sunk on
the bosom of the woman stretched senseless upon the low couch beneath
me. The death-in-life that had got _her_ had got _me_. Lost to the world
about us, we lay, with my blood flowing on her, united in our deathly
trance.

Where were our spirits at that moment? Were they together and conscious
of each other? United by a spiritual bond, undiscovered and unsuspected
by us in the flesh, did we two, who had met as strangers on the fatal
bridge, know each other again in the trance? You who have loved and
lost--you whose one consolation it has been to believe in other worlds
than this--can you turn from my questions in contempt? Can you honestly
say that they have never been _your_ questions too?

CHAPTER VIII. THE KINDRED SPIRITS

THE morning sunlight shining in at a badly curtained window; a clumsy
wooden bed, with big twisted posts that reached to the ceiling; on one
side of the bed, my mother's welcome face; on the other side, an elderly
gentleman unremembered by me at that moment--such were the objects that
presented themselves to my view, when I first consciously returned to
the world that we live in.

"Look, doctor, look! He has come to his senses at last."

"Open your mouth,