The relation of so improbable a story as the following is to be justified only by its truth. The hero is a New York lawyer, sufficiently well known to render the mention of his name, were it allowable to give it, an ample guarantee for the entire trustworthiness of any statement he might make; and it is perhaps to be regretted that his invincible—albeit natural—dislike of publicity prevents the production of evidence which would at least establish the fact that his own belief in the appearances by which he was visited is complete and sincere.

The

Mr. Vantine, although a handsome and intellectual-looking man, is by no means a person whose appearance would in any way single him out as likely to be the hero of marvellous adventures. He is neither especially imaginative nor credulous. He is simply a clear-headed and shrewd business man, such as are nourished in the atmosphere of New York, of all places in the wide world,[144] perhaps, the one least likely to nourish fancy or belief in the unseen. To see him going steadily about his affairs down town, it is hardly probable that any observer, however keen, would look on him as the probable object of remarkable hallucinations, or of experiences so far from the ordinary course of human life, as sure to be classed as such by ninety-nine men out of a hundred.

[144]

Yet John Vantine, of whom most of his acquaintances would have said that he was a commonplace man of business, lived for years a double life, into which he did not venture to initiate even his wife, with whom he lived on terms of the warmest sympathy and closest confidence.

It was on the morning of his wedding-day that certain impressions, which in a vague shape had for years haunted him, first took form so definite that he could not but think of them as something having a tangibility of their own, different though it was from that of the ordinary things which surround common human life. He was married at the home of his bride, a pretty village in western Massachusetts. There being no hotel of even decent comfort in the place, Vantine had passed the night at the inn of a town half a dozen miles away, whence he drove over in[145] the dewy June morning to the scene of his marriage.

[145]

As he passed along between the fields starred with daisies, reflecting in blissful mood upon the beauty of the day and the happiness it brought to him, his horse came suddenly and without warning to a standstill. John 

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