In every emergency, whether he were called upon for practical advice, or simply to cheer and console when the cloud of sorrow seemed well-nigh overpowering, Perthes proved himself, as my father had foreseen, the kindest and most invaluable of friends. Even friendship, however, was powerless to soften the blow, when after the long separation, the months of weary waiting and intense anxiety, the travellers returned, for it but to become evident to my mother at the first glance at my father’s pale face and wasted form, that the good results hoped for from the voyage were far from being realised. It seemed indeed at first sight to have only done him harm, for he was thinner than ever, with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, suffering moreover from temporary surdity, after-effect of an acute attack of inflammation of the ear, by which he had been laid up at New Orleans. To him the shock, the disappointment can have been no less severe, to find poor little Otto’s condition so much worse, whilst my mother’s state of health seemed also well nigh past hope. It was a melancholy return home. As the travellers approached the porch, towards which my mother’s chair had been wheeled to meet them, the shouts of welcome sent up by the men-servants assembled on the steps, the waving of their plumed caps in the air at their master’s approach, all this semblance of rejoicing died away in a general feeling of consternation, in the mute exchange of glances of dismay, in the unspoken dread of that which should come next. Had we but known then, in that darkest, saddest hour, that help was already at hand, standing there ready to cross the threshold, when the need should be greatest! CHAPTER IX A FAITH-HEALER It was in those days that there suddenly came wafted to us across the ocean the tidings of a wondrous discovery, a strange new pursuit for pastime,--I scarce know what to call it,--a new method of healing and new branch of scientific research, some would say, though certainly in this last particular it has not yet justified its claims to be admitted to rank as a science, but has like that other dark mysterious agent, electricity, of which we also know so little, to this day advanced but little beyond the infantile stage. Animal magnetism, table-turning, spirit-rapping, thought-reading and psychography, each and all of these names have been used in turn to designate the various manifestations of this hitherto unknown, or it may be merely neglected and forgotten force.