e had upon the subject. No steamer will leave
England for America till the 3d of February, but within
a few weeks of that time we doubt not it will be
possible to lay before the readers of the _Record_
information which will enable them to come to a pretty
accurate conclusion."

Yes; and no doubt they came to one accurate enough, in the end. But
all this rigmarole is what people call testing a thing by "internal
evidence." The _Record_ insists upon the truth of the story because of
certain facts--because "the initials of the young men _must_ be
sufficient to establish their identity"--because "the nurses _must_ be
accessible to all sorts of inquiries"--and because the "angry
excitement and various rumors which at length rendered a public
statement necessary, are sufficient to show that _something_
extraordinary _must_ have taken place."

To be sure! The story is proved by these facts--the facts about the
students, the nurses, the excitement, the credence given the tale at
New York. And now all we have to do is to prove these facts.
Ah!--_they_ are proved _by the story_.

As for the _Morning Post_, it evinces more weakness in its disbelief
than the _Record_ in its credulity. What the former says about
doubting on account of inaccuracy in the detail of the phthisical
symptoms, is a mere _fetch_, as the Cockneys have it, in order to make
a very few little children believe that it, the Post, is not quite so
stupid as a post proverbially is. It knows nearly as much about
pathology as it does about English grammar--and I really hope it will
not feel called upon to blush at the compliment. I represented the
symptoms of M. Valdemar as "severe," to be sure. I put an extreme
case; for it was necessary that I should leave on the reader's mind no
doubt as to the certainty of death without the aid of the
Mesmerist--but such symptoms _might_ have appeared--the identical
symptoms _have appeared_, and will be presented again and again. Had
the Post been only half as honest as ignorant, it would have owned
that it disbelieved for no reason more profound than that which
influences all dunces in disbelieving--it would have owned that it
doubted the thing merely because the thing was a "wonderful" thing,
and had never yet been printed in a book.

LETHE.

BY HENRY B. HIRST.

_Agressi sunt mare tenebrarum id in eo exploraturi esset._
NUBIAN GEOGRAPHER.