The social arrangements, when our meal was over, fell of themselves into
the right train.

Miss Jillgall went upstairs, with the mother and the children, to see
the nursery and the bedrooms. Mrs. Tenbruggen discovered a bond of
union between the farmer and herself; they were both skilled players at
backgammon, and they sat down to try conclusions at their favorite game.
Without any wearisome necessity for excuses or stratagems, Eunice took
my arm and led me to the welcome retirement of her own sitting-room.

I could honestly congratulate her, when I heard that she was established
at the farm as a member of the family. While she was governess to the
children, she was safe from dangers that might have threatened her,
if she had been compelled by circumstances to return to the Minister's
house.

The entry in her Journal, which she was anxious that I should read, was
placed before me next.

I followed the poor child's account of the fearful night that she had
passed, with an interest that held me breathless to the end. A terrible
dream, which had impressed a sense of its reality on the sleeper by
reaching its climax in somnambulism--this was the obvious explanation,
no doubt; and a rational mind would not hesitate to accept it. But a
rational mind is not a universal gift, even in a country which prides
itself on the idol-worship of Fact. Those good friends who are always
better acquainted with our faults, failings, and weaknesses than we can
pretend to be ourselves, had long since discovered that my nature was
superstitious, and my imagination likely to mislead me in the presence
of events which encouraged it. Well! I was weak enough to recoil from
the purely rational view of all that Eunice had suffered, and heard, and
seen, on the fateful night recorded in her Journal. Good and Evil walk
the ways of this unintelligible world, on the same free conditions.
If we cling, as many of us do, to the comforting belief that departed
spirits can minister to earthly creatures for good--can be felt moving
in us, in a train of thought, and seen as visible manifestations, in a
dream--with what pretense of reason can we deny that the same freedom of
supernatural influence which is conceded to the departed spirit, working
for good, is also permitted to the departed spirit, working for evil?
If the grave cannot wholly part mother and child, when the mother's
life has been good, does eternal annihilation separate them, when the
mother