“I made,” said Beverly to me one day, “my projected tour, and had returned much wiser than I went, but no nearer the consummation of my chief hope. I had begun the practice of medicine in the city of Boston, and occupied an office reputed to have been haunted by the troubled ghosts of sundry persons who were there attracted by some strange influence. I laughed at, and ridiculed the pretensions of scores of so called seers, who claimed to behold these flitting gentry. “There came to my office one day--it was a very stormy day in the latter part of the winter of the year in the spring of which I was so neatly swindled--there came, I repeat, on a stormy day, when the snow fell thick and fast; when the fierce wind blew, and the Frost-king was busily engaged in putting icy manacles upon all that he could reach--a lady to consult me upon a case of scrofula in her child. At that time my reputation in that specialty was great and constantly increasing; for I had but a few months before introduced and practised the method of treating that order of diseases, taught me in Constantinople by the famous negro sage of that metropolis. I prepared the materials required, and stood waiting for her to leave the office, as I was anxious to continue the perusal of some Hieratic manuscripts lent me that day by a lettered friend in Dedham. She made no movement indicative of leaving; but instead, challenged me to a discussion of some spiritual subject or other, which challenge I, from an innate horror of all strong-minded male-feminines, respectfully declined. She called herself my friend, and was, if sticking to one is a title to the name. She possessed all the qualities of the best adhesive plaster--it was impossible to get rid of her presence. She declared that she constantly saw, and held conversations with the dead, and she would then and there give a proof of her qualifications in that direction; whereupon she was instantly seized with an exceedingly violent trembling, accompanied with any amount of spasmodic jerks and twitchings. I had witnessed such things before, and consequently did not feel alarmed at Mrs. Graham’s condition, but going into the rear office I procured a chair and sat down to wait for demonstrations; which, when they came, were but so many pretty word-paintings--commonplace counsel and advice addressed to me by what purported to be my mother--which latter, however, appeared to have forgotten her name, my own, and when and where she departed this life. I was perfectly certain that it was not my mother, and equally so that Mrs. Graham was not consciously acting the part of an impostor, and I accounted for the phenomenon on the Rosicrucian theory, then quite new to me, that she was obsessed, or possessed, by and with a distinct individuality entirely foreign to her own. To my mind the thing was certain that she, like scores of thousands of others are, was for the time being under the absolute control and dominion of a Will a myriad