and
found him in the shocking way you saw."

Jones had no more to tell. Poor Mr. Jennings was very gentle, and very
kind. All his people were fond of him. I could see that the servant was
very much moved.

So, dejected and agitated, I passed from that terrible house, and its
dark canopy of elms, and I hope I shall never see it more. While I write
to you I feel like a man who has but half waked from a frightful and
monotonous dream. My memory rejects the picture with incredulity and
horror. Yet I know it is true. It is the story of the process of a
poison, a poison which excites the reciprocal action of spirit and
nerve, and paralyses the tissue that separates those cognate functions
of the senses, the external and the interior. Thus we find strange
bed-fellows, and the mortal and immortal prematurely make acquaintance.

CONCLUSION

_A Word for Those Who Suffer_

My dear Van L----, you have suffered from an affection similar to that
which I have just described. You twice complained of a return of it.

Who, under God, cured you? Your humble servant, Martin Hesselius. Let me
rather adopt the more emphasised piety of a certain good old French
surgeon of three hundred years ago: "I treated, and God cured you."

Come, my friend, you are not to be hippish. Let me tell you a fact.

I have met with, and treated, as my book shows, fifty-seven cases of
this kind of vision, which I term indifferently "sublimated,"
"precocious," and "interior."

There is another class of affections which are truly termed--though
commonly confounded with those which I describe--spectral illusions.
These latter I look upon as being no less simply curable than a cold in
the head or a trifling dyspepsia.

It is those which rank in the first category that test our promptitude
of thought. Fifty-seven such cases have I encountered, neither more nor
less. And in how many of these have I failed? In no one single instance.

There is no one affliction of mortality more easily and certainly
reducible, with a little patience, and a rational confidence in the
physician. With these simple conditions, I look upon the cure as
absolutely certain.

You are to remember that I had not even commenced to treat Mr. Jennings'
case. I have not any doubt that I should have cured him perfectly in
eighteen months, or possibly it might have extended to two years. Some
cases are very rapidly curable, others extremely tedious. Every
intelligent physician w