CHAPTER I. OLD LADY MAINWARING. I see by the papers that this grand old lady is dead. She had passed her eighty-ninth birthday. Born in a year when Warren Hastings was still on his trial for high crimes and misdemeanours, the only child of Sir Philip Kildhurm of Kildhurm Tower, she was married at seventeen to Captain Frank Mainwaring, of His Britannic Majesty's Navy--a man who enjoyed the distinction of being wounded at Trafalgar. Captain Mainwaring (knighted in 1811 on acceding to his uncle's estates) died in 1840; he left two sons and a daughter. Both the sons died in the cholera epidemic of 1832, unmarried. The daughter was wedded to a gentleman of family and estate, and accompanied him to India, where he held some official position. But his whole family (several children had been born) were murdered in the Sepoy outbreak. Thus it came about that, for the last twenty years, Lady Mainwaring has been the sole survivor of her race; and now she is gone, they are extinct. She was a grand, serene old lady: with a noble face, whose beauty time could not altogether take away, and a majestic figure that scarcely stooped beneath the weight of fourscore years and nine. Her eyes were remarkable--large, black, and keen, and innocent of spectacles to the very end; but her hair, famous two generations since for its sable luxuriance, became in later times snow-white, although the long arched eyebrows kept their former hue. A wonderful old lady: endowed to the last with singular personal fascination, her manner the perfection of gentle dignity, in looking at her, or listening to the inflections of her low deep voice, you felt that hers was a spirit of no ordinary capacities and powers. But she was the descendant of no ordinary ancestry. Several of her progenitors had been endowed with gifts of the kind that modern science is always no less quick to explain away than slow to explain, but in which the folk of a less sophisticated age did powerfully and potently believe. I am not at this moment concerned to enter upon a discussion of supernatural phenomena, so called, beyond remarking that no physiologist can pretend to any right to be heard at all on the subject: the credulity which can believe witchcraft and sorcery to be the bugbears of a diseased imagination being too gross to command attention. Reasonable people believe that the human body has a soul; that there is a spiritual sight answering to the bodily sight; and that when this spiritual sight is opened, it must inevitably behold the objects of a spiritual world. Concerning the spiritual world two or three facts, at least, are self-evident. Being a world of the mind, only the laws of the mind can hold sway there; it is therefore free from the trammels of space and time. Further, it is a world of real substance, in contradistinction to the apparent substantiality of the world of matter. Thus far logic carries us; and we do not at present