ent have produced a sense of
fear or of desire to placate the unknown Force which overruled me,
created in me at first a stinging rage. This is the truth, and the
truth I tell.

In my love and misery, and the shock of this disappointment--against
the unknown opposition to my will, I turned and raved; even as when I
was a man among men I should have raved at him who dared my purpose.

"You are playing with me!" I wailed. "You torture a miserable man.
Who and what are you, that make of death a bitterer thing than life can
guess? Show me what I have to fight, and let me wrestle for my
liberty,--though I am a ghost, let me wrestle like a man! Let me to my
wife! Give way, and let me seek her!"

Shocking and foreign as words like these must be to many of those who
read these pages, it must be remembered that they were uttered by one
to whom faith and the knowledge that comes by way of it were the leaves
of an abandoned text-book. For so many years had the tenets of the
Christian religion been put out of my practical life, even as I put
aside the opinions of the laity concerning the treatment of disease,
that I do not over-emphasize; I speak the simplest truth in saying that
my first experience of death had not in any sense revived the vividness
of lost belief to me. As the old life had ended had the new begun.
Where the tree had fallen it did lie. What was habit before death was
habit after. What was natural then was natural now. What I loved
living I loved dead. That which interested Esmerald Thorne the man
interested Esmerald Thorne the spirit. The incident of death had
raised the temperature of intellect; it had, perhaps, I may say, by
this time quickened the pulse of conscience; but it had in no wise
wrought any miracle upon me, nor created a religious believer out of a
worldly and indifferent man of science. Dying had not forthwith made
me a devout person. Incredible as it may seem, it is the truth that up
to this time I had not, since the moment of dissolution, put to myself
the solemn queries concerning my present state which occupy the
imaginations of the living so much, while yet death is a fact remote
from their experience.

It was the habit of long years with me, after the manner of my kind, to
settle all hard questions by a few elastic phrases, which, once
learned, are curiously pliable to the intellectual touch. "Phenomena,"
for instance,--how plastic to cover whatever one does not understand!