last century, proved in the face of the most incredulous mockery
ever known--an incident most surprising to men who were accustomed to
regard doubt as a weapon against the fact alone, but simple enough
to believers--the fact that Alphonzo-Maria di Liguori, Bishop of
Saint-Agatha, administered consolations to Pope Ganganelli, who saw
him, heard him, and answered him, while the Bishop himself, at a great
distance from Rome, was in a trance at home, in the chair where he
commonly sat on his return from Mass. On recovering consciousness, he
saw all his attendants kneeling beside him, believing him to be dead:
"My friends," said he, "the Holy Father is just dead." Two days later a
letter confirmed the news. The hour of the Pope's death coincided with
that when the Bishop had been restored to his natural state.

Nor had Lambert omitted the yet more recent adventure of an English girl
who was passionately attached to a sailor, and set out from London to
seek him. She found him, without a guide, making her way alone in the
North American wilderness, reaching him just in time to save his life.

Louis had found confirmatory evidence in the mysteries of the ancients,
in the acts of the martyrs--in which glorious instances may be found
of the triumph of human will, in the demonology of the Middle Ages, in
criminal trials and medical researches; always selecting the real fact,
the probable phenomenon, with admirable sagacity.

All this rich collection of scientific anecdotes, culled from so many
books, most of them worthy of credit, served no doubt to wrap parcels
in; and this work, which was curious, to say the least of it, as the
outcome of a most extraordinary memory, was doomed to destruction.

Among the various cases which added to the value of Lambert's _Treatise_
was an incident that had taken place in his own family, of which he
had told me before he wrote his essay. This fact, bearing on the
post-existence of the inner man, if I may be allowed to coin a new word
for a phenomenon hitherto nameless, struck me so forcibly that I have
never forgotten it. His father and mother were being forced into a
lawsuit, of which the loss would leave them with a stain on their good
name, the only thing they had in the world. Hence their anxiety was very
great when the question first arose as to whether they should yield to
the plaintiff's unjust demands, or should defend themselves against him.
The matter came under discussion one autum