Is that odor dead and imperceptible because you have raised a barrier between it and your senses? Does it not exist, even more potently, within its crystal prison? Because you do not perceive that sweetness, would you say it is not? Are our direct senses to settle all points of doubt and difficulty? Or, let a man enter, then, who had never seen a rose, and you were to tell him of the great fragrance of the flower of which bards have sung and Scriptures made similes,—would you not scoff him if he said such things were not possible to a plant like that, that looked like painted paper? Then how can you say anything about it who have never seen a ghost? To your senses it may be as yet hidden by a barrier stronger than glass, but yet as transparent to others. But I do not write to argue, but only to suggest. I admit my own weakness and confess to doubts, and cannot place myself with indisputable certainty on any solid basis of logic, and therefore must allow great scope to others; but since I have ventured to tell my story, I had a strong and natural desire to stand, as well as it was possible upon the platform of rational opinion, and felt that I had a right to attempt to place myself there. If any man can prove that I did not see exactly what I say I saw, let him do so, but let him not attempt to “pshaw” me out of the evidences of my senses, and proclaim from his stolid pedestal, called the “impossible,” that I am a dreamer, a madman, and all that sort of adjectiveness which grows from ignorance of the noun substantives of reason. When he can come to me and show me the authority, not derived from his metaphysics or his sectarianism, or his prejudice, by which he is empowered to deny the possibility or the probability and actuality of ghosts, and settle then and forever that such things cannot be, I will admit that I was crazy; bereft of reason; at one moment gifted with eyesight, and the next deprived of it: things which, by the way, would be more at variance with the “order of Heaven,” and more extraordinary, in fact, than the assumed appearance of that thing we call ghost; and which, after all said, and done, and laughed, and sneered at, is that idea of the human hope baptized in our dreams and our theology, by the name of “Immortality.” You cannot prove to a drowning man that he is not surrounded by water. You may tell him that he can swim; but he will tell you that, though he can, he has the cramp. You may tell him that a ship without volition can float where he is struggling; but he will tell you that the ship has nothing to do with it. He believes in the things that he feels and sees around him, but which you do not experience, and he will not take your arguments and suggestions as the embodiment of an infallible life-preserver. I saw what I saw; prove to me that I did not see it,—for the question is with me and nobody else,—and prove it without the usual insolence, if you can; remembering, in