Of the actual working of the cure, of the mode of treatment, we saw nothing, and heard but little; I only know that little by little, the terrible convulsions were transformed into regular exercise of the muscles, in fact into an involuntary process of therapeutic gymnastics. In course of time, not only was the cure complete, but her own fund of natural magnetism had been discovered to be so exceptional, that my mother was anxious to celebrate her restoration to health by performing a like good work for others, and began visiting Count Szápary’s other patients with him, undertaking a portion of the treatment. At her pressing invitation the lame Fräulein von Bunsen came to stay with us, and thanks to the combined efforts of my mother and Count Szápary, she also was set on her feet again and able to walk after being for five-and-twenty years considered beyond all hope of recovery! For my mother it was the beginning of a new life in more meanings than one, for it was now her turn, after her own miraculous cure, to cultivate and turn to account in the service of humanity, the gift bestowed upon her unawares. She perhaps never became quite so strong as had been at first hoped, and, in fact, she often felt far from well, but the lameness never returned. And it very soon became clearly established, that the possession of magnetic force by no means corresponds to our physical strength or indeed to our bodily health. Concerning this, very thorough investigations were made by my father, who would not have tolerated the idea of anything being done by his wife which could possibly have been harmful to her own health. On that point there could be no shadow of doubt; our experiments in mesmerising and table-turning furnishing constant examples of the presence of these powers in a transcendent degree in persons of specially fragile build and constitutional delicacy. It was just by these that feats were accomplished, which would not merely have taxed their ordinary strength, but would have been impossible to the strongest man. All this will no longer seem so very surprising at the present day, but the period I deal with is of fifty years ago, when these marvels were not yet subjects of common parlance. No Charcot had yet made his experiments with suggestion and hypnotism; indeed, the very names were scarcely known. My father, who was so little inclined to credulity that friends and relations had dubbed him the unbelieving Thomas, gave himself up to the serious study of the question. His naturally philosophic bent found here ample matter for reflection. “I have not the dogmatic arrogance,” he was accustomed to say, “which would enable me to deny the existence of phenomena, simply because I fail to comprehend them!” Investigating them in this spirit, from the purely scientific point of view, he acquired the conviction that they were manifestations of an inner life, the proof of a persistence of thought independent of cerebral cognition, and he