One afternoon, not long since, he was telling me of his extraordinary successes with somnambulists and somnoparlists,—of old ladies cured of nervous headaches and face-twitches, and of young ones put to sleep at a distance from the magnetizer, dropping into a trance suddenly as a bird struck by a gun-shot, simply by an act of his volition,—of water turned into wine, and wine into brandy, to the somnambulic taste,—and so on, till we got wandering into crooked by-paths of physics and metaphysics, that seemed to lead us nowhere in particular,—when I said, "Come, Cousin Moses, suppose you try it on me, by way of experiment. But I have my doubts if you'll ever put me to sleep."
My cousin yielded to my request with alacrity;—every subject for mesmerism was for him legitimate;—and I relinquished myself to his passes with the docility of a man about to be shaved.
The passes from the head downward were kept up perseveringly for half an hour, without my experiencing any change, or manifesting the least symptom of drowsiness. At last the charm began to work. I began to be conscious of a singular trickling or creeping sensation following the motion of his passes down my arms. My respiration grew short. I experienced, however, no tendency to sleep, and my mind was perfectly calm and unexcited. My cousin was satisfied with his experiment so far, but we both concluded it had better end here. So he made the reverse passes, in order to undo the knot he was beginning to tie in my nerves. He did not, however, entirely succeed in untying it. I was a healthy subject, and the magnetism continued to affect my nerves, in spite of the untangling passes.
Soon after, I rose and took my leave. I was strangely excited, but it was a purely physical, and not a mental excitement. Thinking that a walk would quiet me, I went through street after street, until I reached the outskirts of the city. It was a mild September evening. The fine weather and the sight of the trees and fields tempted me to continue my walk. It was near sunset, and I strolled on and on, watching the purple gray and ruddy gold of the clouds, until I had got fairly into the country.
As I rambled on, I was suddenly seized with a fancy to climb a tree which stood by the roadside, and rest myself in a convenient notch which I observed between two of the limbs. I was soon seated in among the branches, with a canopy of leaves around and over me,—feeling, in my still nervous condition, as I leaned my back against the mossy bark, like a magnified tree-toad in clothes.
The air was balmy and fragrant, and against the amber of the western sky rose and fell numberless little clouds of insects. The birds were chirping and fluttering about me, and made their arrangements for their night's lodging, in manifest dread of the clothed tree-toad who had invaded their leafy premises.
The peculiar nervousness which had taken possession of me was now passing off, to be replaced by a species of mental exaltation. I was becoming conscious of something approaching semi-clairvoyance, and yet not in the ordinary form. Sensation, emotion, thought were intensified. The landscape around me was dotted with farm-houses, pillowed in soft, dark clumps of trees. One by one, the lights began to appear at the windows,—soft rising stars of home-joys. The glorious September sunset was fading, but still resplendent in the west. The landscape was pervaded with a deeper repose, the glowing clouds with a diviner splendor than that which filled the eye. Then thronging memories awoke. My remembrances of all my past life in the crowded cities of America and Europe rose vividly before me. In the long strata of solid gray clouds, where the sun had gone down, leaving only a few vapory gold-fishes swimming in the clear spaces above, I could fancy I saw the lonely Roman Campagna and the wondrous dome of St. Peter's, as when first beheld on the horizon ten years ago. Then, as from the slopes of San Miniato at sunset, gray, red-tiled Florence, with its Boboli gardens, full of nightingales, its old towers and cathedrals, and its soaring Giotto Campanile. Then Genoa, with its terraces and marble palaces, and that huge statue of André Doria. Then Naples, gleaming white in the eye of day over her pellucid depths of sea. The golden days of Italy floated by me. Then came the memories, glad or sad, of days that had passed in my own native land,—in the very city that lay behind me,—the intimate communings with dear friends,—the musical and the merry nights,—the trials, anxieties, sorrows——
But all this is very egotistical and unnecessary. I merely meant to say that I was in a peculiar, almost abnormal state of mind, that evening. The spirit had, as it were, been drawn outwards, and perhaps slightly dislocated, by those mesmeric passes of my cousin, and I had not succeeded as yet in adjusting it quite satisfactorily in its old bodily grooves and sockets. The condition I was in was not as pleasant as I could have wished; for I was as alive to painful remembrances and imaginations, as to pleasant ones. I seemed to myself like a revolving lantern of a light-house,—now dark, now glowing with a fiery radiance.
I asked myself, Is it that I have been blind and deaf and dull all my life, and am just waking into real existence? or am I developing into a medium,—Heaven forbid!—and the spirits pushing at some unguarded portal of the nervous system, and striving to take possession? Shall I hear raps and knockings when I return to my solitary chamber, and sit a powerless beholder of damaged furniture, which the spirits will never have the conscience to promise payment for, when my landlady's bill comes in? (By the way, have the spirits ever behaved like gentlemen in this respect, and settled up fair and square for the breakages they have indulged in by way of exemplifying the doctrine of a future state?)
As I soliloquized thus, I was attracted by a low vibrating note among the leaves. Looking through them, I saw, for the first time, that two or three telegraph-wires, which I had observed skirting the road, ran directly through the tree in which I was seated. It was a strange sort of sound, that came in hurried jerks, as it were, accompanied with a corresponding jerk of the wire.