“The flea and perhaps the cockroach have short lives,” said he gravely, “and the next entry might be into something noble. But stop till I tell you why I am going to believe in the transmigration of souls. I had a dream a few nights since. I dreamt that I was a Jewess. I beheld my face in a glass and admired it vastly. My eyes flashed and were full of fire; my lips were scarlet. I wore something white about my head. I knew that I was a Jewess. Shadowy faces of many races of people approached, looked me close in the eye, felt my face with their hands, accosted me, and I could not speak. I was suffocated with the want of speech. But on a sudden I obtained relief. I opened my mouth and spoke, and the words I spoke were Hebrew.”
“D’ye know Hebrew?” said I.
“A stupid question to ask a sailor.”
“How do you know you spoke in Hebrew?”
“Because it wasn’t Greek; because it wasn’t Welsh; because—because—man, it was just Hebrew.”
“And how does transmigration offer here?” said I.
“I was my own soul, informing the body of a Jewess. My soul, of course, couldn’t utter itself, as it was fresh from the body of an Englishman, until it had filled up, as smoke might, every cranny and brain cell of the shape it possessed; until it had penetrated to the crypts and dark foundations of the woman’s heart. Then, seeking vent, my soul broke through the lips of the Jewess. In what tongue, d’ye ask? In what but the tongue of her nation?”
“This,” thought I, “is the lady Aurora’s doing. She it is who’s the Jewess of my poor friend’s dream. The fiery eyes, if not the scarlet lips, are hers, and hers the arrest and suffocation of speech.”
But I guessed it would anger him to put this; yet it grieved me to hear this nonsense in his mouth, and the more because his looks by the moon, that shone upon us while he discoursed, gave a gloomy accentuation of—what shall I call it? not yet madness; not yet craziness; let me rather speak of it as wildness—to his words.
He walked with me for above an hour, talking on this absurdity of transmigration, and reasoning illogically, and often with irreverence, on points relating to the salvation of man. It is a bad sign when religion gets into a man’s head and acidly turns into windiness and nightmare imaginations, as a sweet milk hardens into curdy flatulence in the belly of the suckling.