The doctor said that nothing would have induced him to lay his hands upon that woman’s form when he remembered the appealing look of his extraordinary visitor. It was not personal fear or vulgar superstition, but a higher motive; for inasmuch as no Christian gentlemen would touch with unholy motive the form of a living wife in the presence of a living husband, so he could not disturb the sanctity of her spectral modesty before the face of her suppliant, dead husband. To those who accept the story of the apparition, the logic of the motive must be evident; and if so in this case, why not in all others? Or it may be as it is in life. We meet our acquaintances every day on the street; they pass us without seeing us, or without our seeing them; and yet how absurd it would be to deny their being on the street, walking straight on, absorbed beyond recognition, simply because they did not stop and explain to us the motive that brought them there! Ghosts, in like manner, may cross the clown’s staring vision or the philosopher’s calmer sight, and, because they do not pause and prattle of their object and tell them the motive of their appearance, are we to conclude, as a logical theory demonstrated, that that is a good reason to conclude they were not there at all? Must all facts be denied until the motives are discovered? Is a negative so powerful as to overwhelm an affirmative? If so, the plea of not guilty offered by a criminal should be enough to justify his discharge, despite of circumstantial evidence strong enough to hang him or half a hundred like him. As I stood that night out there in the fatal wood, and thought over the murder and the murderer, I conceived a plan of punishment by which, alone, I thought he could appease the outraged sense of human tenderness for things so young as he had slaughtered. XIV. MY PLAN OF PUNISHMENT. And this is my plan: