"The fatal morocco case being got out of the way, the mesmerizer, chiefly for my edification, put his patient through some 'feats' (if I may so term them). She sneezed when he took snuff. She read a letter which he placed upon her pericardium, and so forth. At last he tried whether he could place me _en rapport_ with her through himself, and succeeded admirably. She described me minutely from head to foot, and said she had known beforehand that her mesmerizer was going to bring a friend with him that day, and had long had a clear presentiment within her of him, and of the manner of man he was. She appeared to be well pleased with my proximity. Suddenly she ceased speaking, and raised herself into a partly sitting posture. I fancied I observed a trembling of her eyelids, and a slight twitching of her lips. The Mesmerizer told us she was passing into the fifth stage--that of self-contemplation and detachment from the external world. This distracted the attention of the two young gentlemen from the young ladies, just as they were beginning to be extremely interesting. One of them had got the length of stating that the hair of the officer (whom she had got _en rapport_ with) was emitting a strange and beautiful light; the other announced that the general's lady, who occupied the floor below, was at that moment drinking very fine caravan tea, the aroma of which she could scent through the floor, and, moreover, she prophesied, clairvoyantically, that she would wake from her mesmeric sleep in a quarter of an hour, and drink some tea herself, and also eat some tea-cake into the bargain. But the lady in the High Condition began to speak again, in an altogether altered voice, which had a strange, and, as I must admit, remarkably beautiful tone. What she said, moreover, was couched in such mystic phraseology, and extraordinary expressions, that I could make no sense of it. But the mesmerizer told us she was saying the most glorious, the most profound, and the most instructive things on the subject of her own stomach. This, of course, I had to take for granted. Quitting the theme of her stomach (to rely again upon her mesmerizer's interpretation), she soared away upon a loftier flight. Sometimes it seemed to me that there occurred whole passages which I had read somewhere or other; I had an idea that I had met with them in Novalis's 'Fragments,' perhaps, or in Schelling's 'Weltseele.' And then she fell back rigid upon her cushions. Her mesmerizer expected her to awake directly, and begged us to go away, because it might have a painful effect upon her if she found strangers about her when she awoke. So we were sent about our business. The two young ladies, about whom nobody had given themselves any further trouble, had thought it as well to wake up some little time before, and slip quietly away.