"'This building,' answered the jailor, 'is called the prison-house of flesh, and the reason you are here is that you belong to "our sort."'
"I groaned, and followed the jailor, who led me below into some horrid cell, where the daylight scarce entered. He turned the key upon me and I awoke."
"Dear me," said I, "that was a very disagreeable dream. There was nothing about Miss Edith in that," I said, smiling wickedly.
"No," he said, savagely, "and whose face do you think the jailor's was in my dream?"
"I have no idea," I replied.
"Why, yours, doctor!" said the young man, suddenly starting up with extreme energy, and darting a look of ferocity towards me.
"Yes, doctor, you are my jailor; it is you who have closed my spirit up in its prison-house of flesh, so that it can no longer soar together in the company of the higher intelligences. It is you who have driven me back again to earth and made me an equal of such minds as your own. You have robbed me of the only woman I ever loved in my life, you——"
"Stay, young man, one moment," I said, "and calm yourself. Is this your gratitude for the relic I brought you yesterday? If I, as you say, have robbed you of one of your lives, don't I offer you another which to a young man of your age and position is a state of existence that I can't say how many would envy, and which, after all, is doing nothing more than my duty as a medical man. Then, as to robbing you of the lady you love, haven't I the power of making you acquainted with her some day in the flesh, if all goes well, and I succeeded in curing you both?"
"If such a meeting should take place, do you think," he said, "that we should experience in the same intense degree those chaste joys of love, as if we were in the spirit, when our souls, unfettered from any particle of clay, are raised to that sublime pitch that we are enabled to understand the profound and lofty discourse of angels and become ourselves for the time a part of the heavenly bodies?"
"My dear young man," I observed, "life is short. If the paradise you are in the habit of entering in your dreams be indeed that place where all good souls hope to go after death, you have but to wait for a few years——"