d some time before his death,
she stated that it was a rare thing he ever talked in his sleep and then
only used the most common expressions.

She told me her mother was born west of Timbuctu, belonged to a Berber
tribe, and had been taken prisoner and sold to slave dealers of the west
African coast.

Several weeks after the boy's death I received from Professor Fales a
liberal translation of the boy's talk and writings, which at the
suggestion of the professor and his friend I have kept a secret, as
neither of us believed in transmigration, or desired to figure as in any
sense encouraging such an outrageously absurd belief.

The translator and professor are both dead and I suppose their copies
have been destroyed. I give mine to the public as a spooky flight of
fancy unworthy of belief, aware that this declaration will cause a few
half-crazy people to believe the tale is true.

THE TRANSLATION.

The city of Theni is the capital of Kami. The western and southern coast
of Kami and the interior country to the central range is a pleasant
land, where palm trees of many kinds grow and there is much tropical
verdure because on these coasts there is a constant current of warm
water, which comes through an untraveled sea lying west and south of us,
and in which float endless paths of sargassum.

To the north and east beyond the central range, as also the land
northeast of us across the sea, are barren wastes of ice and snow. It
has not always been so. Our records show that centuries ago the whole
land was as the south and west coast country, but each year the fields
of ice swallow more and more of our sweet and fertile land, until now we
have but little space for our teeming population and each year less and
less to eat.

On the top of a mountain south of our city dwell a few strange people
with a strange faith and who keep to themselves. For years they have
been building a great ship well up the mountain side. They are directed
and encouraged in this useless labor by a prophet who tells of the early
destruction of our land by ice and water.

I visited the place recently; the great ship is nearly completed and
they are beginning to sheet the hull with copper to protect it from ice
floes.

For three nights past my sleep has been disturbed by strange, wild
dreams. I see the warm ocean currents which wash our shores, shifted
westward by some strange freak of nature, and a land far north of us,
now ice and snow, turne