his rickety body. He pored over the marvelous volumes until he knew long
passages by heart, and understood less of them than his father--which was
unnecessary. He looked a little like his mother, but while she in her
youth had something of the faint and flickering beauty of the Boreal
Lights, poor Gershom never could have suggested anything more heavenly
than a foggy moonlight. When he was fifteen he went to the neighboring
town of Warsaw to school. He had rather heavy weather among the well-knit,
grubby-knuckled urchins of the town, and would have been thoroughly
disheartened but for one happy chance. At the house where he boarded an
amusement called the "Sperrit Rappin's" was much in vogue. A group of
young folks, surcharged with all sorts of animal magnetism, with some
capacity for belief and much more for fun, used to gather about a light
pine table every evening, and put it through a complicated course of
mystical gymnastics. It was a very good-tempered table: it would dance,
hop or slam at the word of command, or, if the exercises took a more
intellectual turn, it would answer any questions addressed to it in a
manner not much below the average capacity of its tormentors.

Gershom Chaney took all this in solemn earnest. He was from the first
moment deeply impressed. He lay awake whole nights, with his eyes fast
closed, in the wildest dreams. His school-hours were passed in trancelike
contemplation. He cared no more for punishment than the fakeer for his
self-inflicted tortures. He longed for the coming of the day when he could
commune in solitude with the unfleshed and immortal. This was the full
flowering of those seeds of fantasy that had fallen into his infant mind
as he lay baking his brains by the wide fire in the old stone house at the
head of the hollow, while his father read, haltingly, of the wonders of
the invisible world.

But, to his great mortification, he saw nothing, heard nothing,