every
person in a ball-room could read the thoughts of the rest, the ball
would seem a travesty on enjoyment, rather than real pleasure, and now
he perceived its force. He also noticed that many were better than he
had supposed, and were trying, in a blundering but persevering way, to
obey their consciences. He saw some unselfish thoughts and acts. Many
things that he had attributed to irresolution or inconsistency, he
perceived were in reality self-sacrifice. He went on in frantic
disquiet, distance no longer being of consequence, and in his roaming
chanced to pass through the graveyard in which many generations of his
ancestors lay buried. Within the leaden coffins he saw the cold
remains; some well preserved, others but handfuls of dust.

"Tell me, O my progenitors," he cried, "you whose blood till this
morning flowed in my veins, is there not some way by which I, as a
spirit, can commune with the material world? I have always admired
your judgment and wisdom, and you have all been in Shadowland longer
than I. Give me, I pray you, some ancestral advice."

The only sound in answer was the hum of the insects that filled the
evening air. The moonlight shone softly, but in a ghastly way, on the
marble crosses of his vault and those around, and he felt an
unspeakable sadness within this abode of the dead. "How many
unfinished lives," he thought, "have ended beneath these sods!
Unimproved talents here are buried in the ground. Unattained
ambitions, and those who died before their time; those who tried, in a
half-hearted way, to improve their opportunities, and accomplished
something, and those who neglected them, and did still less--all are
together here, the just with the unjust, though it be for the last
time. The grave absorbs their bodies and ends their probationary
record, from which there is no appeal."

Near by were some open graves, ready to receive their occupants, while
a little farther on he recognized the Cortlandt mausoleum, looking
exactly as when shown him, through his second sight, by the spirit on
the previous day.

From the graves filled recently, and from many others, rose threads of
coloured matter, in the form of gases, the forerunners of miasma. He
now perceived shadowy figures flitting about on the ground and in the
air, from whose eyes poured streams of immaterial tears. Their brains,
hearts, and vertebral columns were the parts most easily seen, and they
were filled with an inext