rable head of the college, somewhat blown with climbing the
steep stairway, stood on the threshold. With a sensation of prodigious
relief, I fell back on my pillow.

It appeared that I had swooned while in the observing-chair, the night
before, and had been found by the janitor in the morning, my head fallen
forward on the telescope, as if still observing, but my body cold,
rigid, pulseless, and apparently dead.

In a couple of days I was all right again, and should soon have
forgotten the episode but for a very interesting conjecture which had
suggested itself in connection with it. This was nothing less than
that, while I lay in that swoon, I was in a conscious state outside
and independent of the body, and in that state received impressions
and exercised perceptive powers. For this extraordinary theory I had no
other evidence than the fact of my knowledge in the moment of awaking
that President Byxbee was coming up the stairs. But slight as this clue
was, it seemed to me unmistakable in its significance. That knowledge
was certainly in my mind on the instant of arousing from the swoon. It
certainly could not have been there before I fell into the swoon. I must
therefore have gained it in the mean time; that is to say, I must have
been in a conscious, percipient state while my body was insensible.

If such had been the case, I reasoned that it was altogether unlikely
that the trivial impression as to President Byxbee had been the only one
which I had received in that state. It was far more probable that it had
remained over in my mind, on waking from the swoon, merely because it
was the latest of a series of impressions received while outside the
body. That these impressions were of a kind most strange and startling,
seeing that they were those of a disembodied soul exercising faculties
more spiritual than those of the body, I could not doubt. The desire
to know what they had been grew upon me, till it became a longing which
left me no repose. It seemed intolerable that I should have secrets from
myself, that my soul should withhold its experiences from my intellect.
I would gladly have consented that the acquisitions of half my waking
lifetime should be blotted out, if so be in exchange I might be shown
the record of what I had seen and known during those hours of which my
waking memory showed no trace. None the less for the conviction of its
hopelessness, but rather all the more, as the perversity of our human
nat