of
what nature I should conjecture it to have been.

A packet of letters in his desk were marked "to be burnt unopened;"
but at the same time carefully docketed with dates: these dates were
all immediately after that time, extending over ten days.

The exact day was November 8, 1872. It is engraved in a small silver
locket that hung on his watch-chain, where he was accustomed to have
important days in his life marked, such as the day he adopted his
boy, his mother's death. It is preceded by the Greek letters [Greek: BP],
which from a certain entry in his diary I conceive to be
[Greek: baptisma pyros], "the baptism of fire."

Lastly, in a diary for that year, kept with fair regularity up till
November 8, there here intervenes a long blank, the only entry being
November 9: "Salvum me fac, Dne."

I took the trouble, incidentally, to hunt up the files of a Cambridge
journal of that date, to see if I could link it on to any event, and
I found there recorded, in the course of that week, what I at first
imagined to be the explanation of the incidents, and own I was a good
deal surprised.

I found recorded some Revivalist Mission Services, which were then
held in Cambridge with great success. I at once concluded that he
underwent some remarkable spiritual experience, some religious
fright, some so-called conversion, the effects of which only
gradually disappeared. The contagion of a Revivalist meeting is a
very mysterious thing. Like a man going to a mesmerist, an individual
may go, announcing his firm intention not to be influenced in the
smallest degree by anything said or done. Nay more, he may think
himself, and have the reputation of being, a strong, unyielding
character, and yet these are the very men who are often most
hopelessly mesmerized, the very men whom the Revival most
absolutely--for the occasion--enslaves. And thus, knowing that one
could form no _prima facie_ judgments on the probabilities in such a
matter, I came to the conclusion that he had fallen, in some degree,
under the influence of these meetings.

But in revising this book, and carefully recalling my own and
studying others' impressions, I came to the conclusion that it was
impossible that this should be the case.

1. In the first place, he was more free than any man I ever saw from
the influence of contagious emotions; he dissembled his own emotions,
and contemned the public display of them in other people.

2. He had, I remember, a strange