“No,—I wish I could. Peek once said to me, that he wouldn’t have believed these things on _my_ testimony, and couldn’t expect me to believe them on _his_.” “Our business,” said the Professor, “is with the life before us. I agree with Comte, that we ought to confine ourselves to positive, demonstrable facts; with Humboldt, that ‘there is not much to boast of after our dissolution,’ and that ‘the blue regions on the other side of the grave’[9] are probably a poet’s dream. Let us not trouble ourselves about the inexplicable or the uncertain.” “But you do not consider, Professor, that Peek’s facts _are_ positive to his experience. Besides, to say, with Comte, that a fact is inexplicable, and that we can’t go beyond it, is not to demonstrate that the fact has its cause in itself; it is merely to confess the mystery of a cause unknown.”[10] “Well, Horace, I’m sleepy, and must retire. I’ll find an opportunity to cross-examine Peek before I go, and you shall see how he will contradict and stultify himself.” Before the opportunity was found, the Professor had _passed on_. Less modest than Rabelais was in his last moments, he did not condescend to say, “I go to inquire into a great possibility.” The physician in attendance, who was a young man, and had recently “experienced religion,” asked the Professor if he had found the Lord Jesus. To which the Professor, making a wry face, replied, “Jargon!” “Have you no regard for your soul?” asked the well-meaning doctor. “Can you prove to me, young man, that I _have_ a soul?” returned the Professor, trying to raise himself on his pillow, in an argumentative posture. “Don’t you believe in a future state?” asked the doctor. “I believe what can be proved,” said the Professor; “and there are two things, and only two, that can be proved,—though Berkeley thinks we can’t prove even those,—matter and motion.[11] All phenomena are reducible to matter and motion,—matter and motion,—matter and mo-o-o—” The effort was too much for the moribund Professor. He did not complete the utterance of his formula, at least on this side of the great curtain. Probably when he awoke in the next life, conscious of his identity, he felt very much in the mood of that other man of science, who, on being told that the microscope would confute an elaborate theory he had raised, refused to look through the impertinent instrument. For several months Peek retained his place under Braxton. But even overseers, whip in hand, cannot frighten off Death. Braxton disappeared through the common portal. His successor, Hawks, had a theory that the true mode of managing niggers was to overawe them by extreme severity at the start, and then taper off into clemency. He had been lord of the lash a week or two, when he was asked by Mr. Barnwell how he got along with Peek.