Arriving at the landing, we found two of the guides dressing the Doctor's deer, and the others preparing for dinner. As night came on my excitement returned, and I remained in the camp while the others went out on the lake,--not from fear of such an experience as I had the night before, for I enjoyed the wild emotions, as one enjoys the raging of the sea around the rocks he stands on, with a kind of tremulous apprehension,--but to see what effect the camp would produce on the state of feeling which I had begun to look at as something normal in my mental development. The rest of the party had gone out in two boats, and three of the guides, taking another, went on an excursion of their own; the two remaining, having cleared the supper-things away and lighted their pipes, were engaged in their tent, playing _old sledge_ by the light of a single candle. There was a race out on the lake, and a far-off merriment, with an occasional halloo, like a suggestion of a busy world somewhere, but all so softened and toned down that it did not jar on my tranquillity. There was a crackling fire of green logs as large as the guides could lift and lay on, and they simmered in the blaze, and lit up the surrounding tree-trunks and the overhanging foliage, and faintly explored the recesses of the forest beyond. I lay on the blankets, and near to me seemed to sit my daemon, ready to be questioned. At this instant there came a doubt of the theological position of my ghostly _vis-a-vis_, and I abruptly thought the question, "Who are you?" "Nobody," replied the daemon, oracularly. This I knew in one sense to be true; and I replied, "But you know what I mean. Don't trifle. Of what nature is your personality?" "Do you think," it replied, "that personality is necessary to existence? We are spirit." "But wherein, save in the having or not having a body, do you differ from me?" "In all the consequences of that difference." "Very well,--go on." "Don't you see that without your circumstances you are only half a being?--that you are shaped by the action and reaction between your own mind and surrounding things, and that the body is the only medium of this action and reaction? Do you not see that without this there would have been no consciousness of self, and consequently neither individuality nor personality? Remove those circumstances by removing the body, and do you not remove personality?" "But," said I, "you certainly have individuality, and wherein does that differ from personality?" "Possibly you commit two mistakes," replied the daemon. "As to the distinction, it is one with a difference. You are personal to yourself, individual to others; and we, though individual to you, may be still impersonal. If spirit takes form from having something to act on, the fact that we act on you is sufficient, so far as you are concerned, to cause an individuality." I hesitated, puzzled.