need to go farther. For if man, living as to his body in the material world, lives at the same time as to his spirit in the spiritual world, then prophecy, soothsaying, second-sight, or whatever 'miracle' involves the transgression of no spiritual principle, becomes only the corollary of our theorem. The wonder-workers of old are justified. As for the Charlatans, they are not tricksters merely, but profaners, whose doom is spiritual death. It was not unknown to some of the more intimate of Lady Mainwaring's friends that she possessed abnormal powers; and though she was constitutionally reserved in her communications, she occasionally came out with some noteworthy utterance on the subject. But if she saw and knew things beyond the ordinary scope, these influenced her spiritual rather than her material existence. She was well poised; there was no one-sidedness in her character; the spirit was so soundly and healthily wedded to the body that neither was in excess; they performed their several functions in such harmony that one was seldom engaged apart from the other. But although this was happily the case with Lady Mainwaring, it had been otherwise with some of her ancestors. They could not walk the world with even and measured steps, but ever and anon plunged or soared into abysses which no mortal plummet has sounded. In Lady Mainwaring's later years, a spirit of sweet and dignified garrulity occasionally inspired her, under the influence of which she would relate to discreet and sympathetic ears many strange particulars both of her own and of her forefathers' history. Now that she is gone, I am at liberty to reproduce some of these communications; giving them, so far as is possible, a connected and consecutive form. Her singularly fascinating narrative faculty, however, I cannot pretend to imitate. She was full of unrhymed and unwritten poetry of an elevated and mystic stamp. She had no ambition to be a writer, and after all she could never have done herself justice on paper. Whoever had listened to the subdued melody of her tones, flexible, various, controlled, and reflecting every emotional phase of the tale as it was told; whoever had felt the blood shrink to his heart at crises of the story, marked by a slight movement of her long white hands, a quiver of the black brows, an unexpected hush in the voice--whoever had had experience of this would have known that it was not to be sought on any printed page. Yet there was nothing histrionic in Lady Mainwaring's demeanour. A person sitting a dozen yards away from her could not have distinguished a word she said, and would scarcely have perceived that she was making use of gestures to enforce her meaning. It needed a close eye to catch all the subtle play of that venerable countenance.