“He put the little boy to sleep very shortly, then drew him by magnetic passes out of his chair, and caused him while evidently all the time asleep, to imitate him [Dr. Elliotson] in all his attitudes and movements. We both firmly believed that the boy _was_ asleep. We then went to the house of another patient, Emma Melhuish, the daughter of a glazier, sixteen years old, and ill in bed from cataleptic fits.” This was a very remarkable case, and had attracted considerable attention. Emma Melhuish was a very beautiful girl, and she was perhaps the most remarkable instance I ever witnessed of a singular phenomenon resulting from magnetic sleep, which has been often spoken of in relation to other cases--the truly wonderful spiritual beauty assumed by the features and expression of the patient during superinduced cataleptic trance, which has never, I believe, been observed in cases of natural catalepsy. I have seen this girl, Emma Melhuish (doubtless a very pretty girl in her normal state of health, but with nothing intellectually or morally special about her), throw herself during her magnetic trance into attitudes of adoration, the grace and expressiveness of which no painter could hope to find in the best model he ever saw or heard of, while her face and features, eyes especially, assumed a rapt and ecstatic expressiveness which no Saint Theresa could have equalled. It was a conception of Fra Angelico spiritualised by the presence of the breath of life. Never shall I forget the look of the girl as I saw her in that condition! I can see her now! and can remember, as I felt it then, the painfulness of the suggestion that such an apparent outlook of the soul was in truth nothing more than the result of certain purely material conditions of the body. But was it such? Here is my diary’s account of what I saw that first day:-- “We found her in mesmeric sleep, she having been so since left by Dr. Elliotson in that condition the day before. We heard her predict the time when her fits would recur, and saw the prediction verified with the utmost exactitude. We heard her declare in what part of the house her various sisters were at the moment, saying that one had just left the counting-house and had come into the next room, all which statements we carefully verified. My mother and myself came home fully persuaded that, let the explanatory theory of the matter be what it might, there had been no taint of imposture in what we had witnessed.” On subsequent visits we assured ourselves of the entire truthfulness of statements to the effect that Emma was conscious of the approach of Dr. Elliotson, while he was still in a different street, and to the punctuality with which she went to sleep and waked, at the hour she had named herself as that when she should do so.