ocesses," and have
been astonished by wholly unexpected results. In the cases I am thinking
of there could have been no possibility of "suggestion" or sub-conscious
action of any kind. One might as well suppose a schoolboy "suggesting"
the existence of AEschylus to himself, while he plods mechanically
through the declensions.

'But you have noticed the obscurity,' Ambrose went on, 'and in this
particular case it must have been dictated by instinct, since the writer
never thought that her manuscripts would fall into other hands. But the
practice is universal, and for most excellent reasons. Powerful and
sovereign medicines, which are, of necessity, virulent poisons also, are
kept in a locked cabinet. The child may find the key by chance, and
drink herself dead; but in most cases the search is educational, and the
phials contain precious elixirs for him who has patiently fashioned the
key for himself.'

'You do not care to go into details?'

'No, frankly, I do not. No, you must remain unconvinced. But you saw how
the manuscript illustrates the talk we had last week?'

'Is this girl still alive?'

'No. I was one of those who found her. I knew the father well; he was a
lawyer, and had always left her very much to herself. He thought of
nothing but deeds and leases, and the news came to him as an awful
surprise. She was missing one morning; I suppose it was about a year
after she had written what you have read. The servants were called, and
they told things, and put the only natural interpretation on them--a
perfectly erroneous one.

'They discovered that green book somewhere in her room, and I found her
in the place that she described with so much dread, lying on the ground
before the image.'

'It was an image?'

'Yes, it was hidden by the thorns and the thick undergrowth that had
surrounded it. It was a wild, lonely country; but you know what it was
like by her description, though of course you will understand that the
colours have been heightened. A child's imagination always makes the
heights higher and the depths deeper than they really are; and she had,
unfortunately for herself, something more than imagination. One might
say, perhaps, that the picture in her mind which she succeeded in a
measure in putting into words, was the scene as it would have appeared
to an imaginative artist. But it is a strange, desolate land.'

'And she was dead?'

'Yes. She had poisoned herself--in time. No; there was not a word