------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE SPIRIT-RAPPER. CHAPTER I. THE FIRST LESSON. My days are numbered; I am drawing near to the close of my earthly pilgrimage, and I must soon take my final departure,—whither, I dread to think. But before I go I would leave a brief record of some incidents in my worse than unprofitable life. A few who have known me, and will have the charity to breathe a prayer at my grave, may be glad to possess it; and others of my countrymen, who know not what to think of the marvellous phenomena daily and hourly exhibited in their midst, or are vainly striving to explain them on natural principles, may find it neither uninteresting nor uninstructive. Of my exterior life I have not much to record, for though few have played a more active or important part in the great events of the past few years, my name has rarely been connected with them before the public. I was born in a small town in Western New York. My parents were honest agriculturists from Connecticut, and descended from ancestors who, with Hooker, founded the colony of Hartford. They were among the early settlers of what used to be called the “Holland Purchase,” and, till emigrating to the new world west of the Genesee, were rigid Puritans. Like most emigrants from the land of “steady habits,” they were intelligent, moral, industrious, and economical, and, as a matter of course, soon prospered in this world’s goods, and became able to give their only son the best education the State could furnish, and to leave him a competent estate. I made my preparatory studies at Batavia, and entered, at seventeen, the Freshman class of Union College, Schenectady. I remained at college four years, a diligent, if not a brilliant student, and graduated at the close with the highest standing, and the general love and esteem of my classmates. My early predilection was for the mathematical and physical sciences. The moral and intellectual sciences were not much to my taste. I took no great interest in them. They struck me as vague, uncertain, and unprofitable. I preferred what M. Comte has since called _Positive Philosophy_. I soon mastered mathematics, mechanics, and physics, as far as they were taught in our college, but I found my greatest delight in chemistry, which, by its subtle analyses, seemed to promise me an approach to the vital principle and to the essences of things.