dy
and spirit. It was his belief that the ghosts were robbing her of her
vitality, and earnestly but vainly he strove to banish them. She herself
declared, with a tone of indescribable relief, that she knew the end was
near, and that she welcomed it, as she longed to attain the quiet of the
grave with her father and Grandfather and Grandmother Schmidgall. When
Kerner sought to cheer her by the assurance that she yet had many years
to live, she silenced him with the tale of a gruesome vision. Three
times, she said, there had appeared to her at dead of night a female
figure, wrapped in black and standing beside an open and empty coffin,
to which it beckoned her. But before she died she wished to see again
the mountains of her childhood; and to the mountains Kerner carried her.
There, on August 5, 1829, peacefully and happily, to the singing of
hymns and the sobbing utterance of prayers, her soul took its flight.

But, unlike Kerner, who hastened back to Weinsberg to write the
biography of this "delicate flower who lived upon sunbeams," we must
shake off the spell of her strange personality and ask seriously what
manner of mortal she was. This inquiry is the more imperative since the
doings of the tambourine players and automatic writers, of whom so much
is made in certain quarters to-day, pale into insignificance beside the
story of her remarkable career.

Now, in point of fact, the evidence bearing out the claim that she saw
and talked with the dead is practically confined to the account written
by the mourning Kerner, whom no one would for a moment call an
unprejudiced witness. Already deeply immersed in the study of the
marvelous, his mind absorbed in the weird phenomena of the recently
discovered science of animal magnetism, she came to him both as a
patient and as a living embodiment of the mysteries that held for him a
boundless fascination, and once he found reason to believe in her
alleged supernormal powers, there was nothing too fantastic or
extravagant to which he would not give ready credence and assent.

His lengthy record of "facts" includes not only what he himself saw or
thought he saw, but every tale and anecdote related to him by the
seeress and her friends, and also includes so many incidents of
supernaturalism on the part of others that it would well seem that half
the peasant population of Wuertemberg were ghost seers. Besides this,
detailed as his narrative is, it is lacking in precisely those deta