e other powers of nature whose elemental essence escapes our
observation.

"'For instance,' said he, 'if you place your hand in that of a
somnambulist who, when awake, can press it only up to a certain average
of tightness, you will see that in the somnambulistic state--as it is
stupidly termed--his fingers can clutch like a vise screwed up by a
blacksmith.'--Well, monsieur, I placed my hand in that of a woman, not
asleep, for Bouvard rejects the word, but isolated, and when the old man
bid her squeeze my wrist as long and as tightly as she could, I begged
him to stop when the blood was almost bursting from my finger tips.
Look, you can see the marks of her clutch, which I shall not lose for
these three months."

"The deuce!" exclaimed Monsieur Gault, as he saw a band of bruised
flesh, looking like the scar of a burn.

"My dear Gault," the doctor went on, "if my wrist had been gripped in
an iron manacle screwed tight by a locksmith, I should not have felt
the bracelet of metal so hard as that woman's fingers; her hand was
of unyielding steel, and I am convinced that she could have crushed my
bones and broken my hand from the wrist. The pressure, beginning almost
insensibly, increased without relaxing, fresh force being constantly
added to the former grip; a tourniquet could not have been more
effectual than that hand used as an instrument of torture.--To me,
therefore, it seems proven that under the influence of passion, which is
the will concentrated on one point and raised to an incalculable power
of animal force, as the different varieties of electric force are also,
man may direct his whole vitality, whether for attack or resistance,
to one of his organs.--Now, this little lady, under the stress of her
despair, had concentrated her vital force in her hands."

"She must have a good deal too, to break a wrought-iron bar," said the
chief warder, with a shake of the head.

"There was a flaw in it," Monsieur Gault observed.

"For my part," said the doctor, "I dare assign no limits to nervous
force. And indeed it is by this that mothers, to save their children,
can magnetize lions, climb, in a fire, along a parapet where a cat would
not venture, and endure the torments that sometimes attend childbirth.
In this lies the secret of the attempts made by convicts and prisoners
to regain their liberty. The extent of our vital energies is as yet
unknown; they are part of the energy of nature itself, and we draw them
from