I do not remember whether she alleged any inspiration in coming to see me for this good object; but a summer or two since a lady came to me, at my hotel in the mountains, who said that she had been moved to do so by an impulse which seemed little short of mystical. She said that she was not ordinarily superstitious, but she had wakened that morning in Boston with my name the first thing in her thoughts, and it seemed so directly related to what she had in view that she could not resist the suggestion it conveyed that she should come at once to lay her scheme before me. She took a good deal of time to do this; and romantic as it appeared, I felt sure that she was working with real material. It was of a nature so complex, however, and on a scale so vast, that I should despair of getting it intelligibly before the reader, and I will not attempt it. I listened with the greatest interest; but at the end I was obliged to say that I thought her mystical impulse was mistaken; I was sorry it had deceived her; I was quite certain that I had not the means or the tastes to enter upon the æsthetic enterprise which she proposed. In return, I suggested a number of millionaires whose notorious softness of heart, or whose wish to get themselves before the public by their good deeds, ought to make them more available, and we parted the best of friends. I am not yet quite able to make up my mind that she was not the victim of a hypnotic suggestion from the unseen world, and altogether innocent in her appeal to me. XI.