Is the secret solved? Am I the herald-searchlight to His path?
(And is he—the Savant—my mission aid)? Near by me, concealed by art-screen, I hear a sob, and see a yellow gleam of hair drop on a loving shoulder. Saucy sobs up to a face, thinking deeply. “Cholly,” coaxing, “what shall we do—will she go up into the sky?”
A jerk of the shoulder straightens up the head, and sobers the grotesque grief of its face. “No, you do not know her. She is smart, I allow, but not so smart as she thinks.” (I feel so funny as I listen). “She is weak yet from her illness is all.”
“O!” ejaculates Saucy as she relapses to her usual self.
Something rustles under my feet. I pick up a piece of American newspaper. Saucy says behind me, “That was around my lunch mamma put up. She is still looking, I suppose,” deeply sighing.
I carefully read each precious word. A short but torn excerpt on science contains this: “I said one good thing of the soul. That it was electrified after death.”
I am at sea. It was not Savant’s lore, but my father’s, who had deceived me. I go to him with the scrap. He reads and smiles, then takes up a leaf near him. Holding over it a microscope, I see on it a picture of cloud lightening taking a spirit to the sky. A wielder of that lightening concealed afar off. I am at sea again.
I take to studying the leaves myself, seeing how useless to question Savant.
Charley and Mae too study with me. Still, the latter jealously watches Savant. Whose modes and agencies are new. Though I see magnetism appear at times, I cannot tell how produced (he works in an alcove one side).
Every morning I am a fixture here, studying, marking a place on the register to visit in the afternoon. So safe am I, now a citizen, I often go alone. Charmed as “Van Winkle,” stay long away.