man I ever loved in my life, with the atoms of his nature clinging to you? Think you that I know aught of your doings? That I have been informed as to where _he_ lives? I tell you, No; I know nothing but what my senses tell me. I feel you have been with him, and whatever you might tell me to the contrary would not make me believe otherwise."
"Well," I said smiling, "I don't deny that I _have_ just come from a patient in London, whose name is Charles; but London is large, and there are many Charleses."
"I do not care _where_ your patient is--whether at London or the North Pole, I shall probably never come across him; in fact, I don't see that it would aid matters much if I were to. I have never seen him--that is to say, with these eyes--and probably never may," she said, with a deep sigh.
"Do I understand you to say that you have never seen this young man you talk about, and yet you take so much interest in him?"
"Never with the eyes of the body," she replied.
"How, then?" I asked.
"With the eyes of the spirit."
"That is to say," I resumed, "that this young man named Charles is but a creature of the imagination--that he has no real existence."
"Oh, pardon me," she replied; "decidedly he has an existence--a double one. A bodily one, of which I know nothing; and a spiritual one, of which I know more."
"How?" I asked. "You have never seen him in the flesh, but are yet acquainted with his spirit. Does the spirit leave his body and appear to you?"
"Precisely so."
"Oh! but these are hallucinations, my dear young lady," I said, "that patients in your state of health are frequently subject to."
"No, doctor; say not so," she answered. "It is now more than a year since, that in my dream, as I was walking alone in a beautiful garden, I met a young man, also quite alone and reading. He was of extraordinary personal beauty. He looked at me a moment and passed by. The very next evening I had the same dream--there he was again. The dream was so very vivid, that I could not believe it to be one of those ordinary dreams so common to persons suffering from indigestion. There was such a reality about the whole--the garden, the terraces, the old house--altogether had too much truth about it to have been a dream."
"And what do you think it was, if not a dream?" I asked, smiling.
"Nothing less," she replied "than a glimpse into that world so zealously guarded from our mortal eyes as to make us doubt of its existence, or, at least, to hold it as something so ethereal and visionary that we tremble even to speculate on it; but which, nevertheless, exists, has existed, and will exist to all eternity in form as palpable as the earth we this day inhabit."
I mused a little, then said, "Dreams are often very vivid; I know that by experience, but upon waking I have always been 

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