In a word, there is no expressing the obstinacy of my brother in rejecting my story, nor the adroitness with which he met such proofs as I could give him of the truth of it. The last instance of it which I shall relate was his taking the part of the German doctor, Feuerteufel, who, he declared, had not only never made a mummy of me, but had not laid claim to me as his property, though he himself (that is, my brother-in-law) had been present at least a dozen times when the German doctor did so in my sick-chamber, from which Alderwood was so instrumental in expelling him. He even insisted that this man, having made a second and last visit to our village to hunt plants and reptiles, had been employed (and at his own instance too) to cure me of that very malady he so ridiculously would have me believe I had been afflicted with, and that it was to him, under Heaven, I owed my restoration to health. Nay, he even went the length of showing me what he called the doctor's bill; and, true enough, it was a bill, with a receipt in full upon it; but the amount being prodigiously great, I saw at once into the whole affair, which was nothing less than a masked contract betwixt my brother-in-law and the doctor, whereby the latter secretly covenanted, in consideration of the large sum received from the former, to persecute me no longer with his claims, and perhaps to leave the country altogether. Besides all this, my brother attacked me by demanding by what means it was that I had transferred my spirit so often, and so easily, from one body to another. And this being a question on which the reader may require satisfaction as well as my brother, I must allow that it presents a difficulty, and a very great one. All that I can say to this is, first, that I _did_ transfer my spirit from body to body, and no less than seven different times; secondly, that these seven translations of spirit indicated in me the possession of a peculiar power to make them; and thirdly, that the existence of such a peculiar power, however wonderful it may appear, is not beyond the bounds of philosophic probability.