they piled on wood, and talked of their recent
experiences.

"However unwilling I was," said Cortlandt, "to believe my senses, which
I felt were misleading me, I can no longer doubt the reality of that
spirit bishop, or the truth of what he says. When you look at the
question dispassionately, it is what you might logically expect. In my
desire to disprove what is to us supernatural, I tried to create
mentally a system that would be a substitute for the one he described,
but could evolve nothing that so perfectly filled the requirements, or
that was so simple. Nothing seems more natural than that man, having
been evolved from stone, should continue his ascent till he discards
material altogether. The metamorphism is more striking in the first
change than in the second. Granted that the soul is immaterial, and
that it leaves the body after death, what is there to keep it on earth?
Gravitation cannot affect it. What is more likely than that it is left
behind by the earth in its orbit, or that it continues its forward
motion, but in a straight line, till, reaching the paths of the greater
planets, it is drawn to them by some affinity or attraction that the
earth does not possess, and that the souls held in that manner remain
here on probation, developing like young animals or children, till, by
gradually acquired power, resulting from their wills, they are able to
rise again into space, to revisit the earth, and in time to explore the
universe? It might easily come about that, by some explainable
sympathy, the infant good souls are drawn to this planet, while the
condemned pass on to Cassandra, which holds them by some property
peculiar to itself, until perhaps they, too, by virtue of their wills,
acquire new power, unless involution sets in and they lose what they
have. The simplicity of the thing is what surprises me now, and that
for ages philosophers have been racking their brains with every
conceivable fancy, when, by simply extending and following natural
laws, they could discern the whole."

"It is the old story," said Bearwarden, "of Columbus and the egg.
Schopenhouer and his predecessors appear to have tried every idea but
the right one, and even Darwin and Huxley fell short in their
reasoning, because they tried to obtain more or less than four by
putting two with two."

Thus they sat and talked while the night wore on. Neither thought of
sleeping, hoping all the while that Ayrault might walk in as he