bodily functions, without being accused of laying "all that we are evil
in to a divine thrusting on," we had better return at once to our old
demonology, and reinstate the Leader of the Lower House in his
time-honored prerogatives.

As fiction sometimes seems stranger than truth, a few words may be needed
here to make some of my characters and statements appear probable. The
long-pending question involving a property which had become in the mean
time of immense value finds its parallel in the great De Haro land-case,
decided in the Supreme Court while this story was in progress (May 14th,
1867). The experiment of breaking the child's will by imprisonment and
fasting is borrowed from a famous incident, happening long before the
case lately before one of the courts of a neighboring Commonwealth, where
a little girl was beaten to death because she would not say her prayers.
The mental state involving utter confusion of different generations in a
person yet capable of forming a correct judgment on other matters, is
almost a direct transcript from nature. I should not have ventured to
repeat the questions of the daughters of the millionaires to Myrtle
Hazard about her family conditions, and their comments, had not a lady of
fortune and position mentioned to me a similar circumstance in the school
history of one of her own children. Perhaps I should have hesitated in
reproducing Myrtle Hazard's "Vision," but for a singular experience of
his own related to me by the late Mr. Forceythe Willson.

Gifted Hopkins (under various alliasis) has been a frequent correspondent
of mine. I have also received a good many communications, signed with
various names, which must have been from near female relatives of that
young gentleman. I once sent a kind of encyclical letter to the whole
family connection; but as the delusion under which they labor is still
common, and often leads to the wasting of time, the contempt of honest