"I would that all angels were your equal in learning," I said. But Meriline had turned from me in utter forgetfulness, and was saying over and over, with joy in her uplifted face, "Thy will be done! Thy will be done!" "Truly," I said to myself, as I passed along the line, "he who worships the Father as the Self of the beloved has already acquired a soul." A GHOST[6] BY LAFCADIO HEARN [Footnote 6: From _Karma_ (Boni & Liveright).] I Perhaps the man who never wanders away from the place of his birth may pass all his life without knowing ghosts; but the nomad is more than likely to make their acquaintance. I refer to the civilized nomad, whose wanderings are not prompted by hope of gain, nor determined by pleasure, but simply compelled by certain necessities of his being--the man whose inner secret nature is totally at variance with the stable conditions of a society to which he belongs only by accident. However intellectually trained, he must always remain the slave of singular impulses which have no rational source, and which will often amaze him no less by their mastering power than by their continuous savage opposition to his every material interest. These may, perhaps, be traced back to some ancestral habit--be explained by self-evident hereditary tendencies. Or perhaps they may not,--in which event the victim can only surmise himself the _Imago_ of some pre-existent larval aspiration--the full development of desires long dormant in a chain of more limited lives. Assuredly the nomadic impulses differ in every member of the class, take infinite variety from individual sensitiveness to environment--the line of least resistance for one being that of greatest resistance for another; no two courses of true nomadism can ever be wholly the same. Diversified of necessity both impulse and direction, even as human nature is diversified! Never since consciousness of time began were two beings born who possessed exactly the same quality of voice, the same precise degree of nervous impressibility, or, in brief, the same combination of those viewless force-storing molecules which shape and poise themselves in sentient substance. Vain, therefore, all striving to particularize the curious psychology of such existences; at the very utmost it is possible only to describe such impulses and preceptions of nomadism as lie within the very small range of one's own observation. And whatever in these is strictly personal can have little interest or value except in so far as it holds something in common with the great general experience of restless lives. To such experience may belong, I think, one ultimate result of all those irrational partings, self-wrecking, sudden isolations, abrupt severances from all attachment, which form the history of the nomad--the knowledge that a strong silence is ever deepening and expanding about one's life, and that in that silence there are ghosts. II