For several years this Quaker youth had been the subject of remarkable
emotional experiences, in explanation of which the rude wits of the
village declared that he had been moon-struck; the young girls who
adored his beauty thought he was in love, and the venerable fathers and
mothers of this religious community believed that in him the scriptural
prophecy, "Your young men shall see visions," had been literally
fulfilled. David Corson himself accepted the last explanation with
unquestioning faith. He no more doubted the existence of a spiritual
than of a material universe. He did not even conceive of their having
well-defined boundaries, but seemed to himself to pass from one to the
other as easily as across the lines of adjoining farms. In this respect
he resembled many a normal youth, except that this impression had
lingered with him a little longer than was usual; for faith is always
instinctive, while skepticism is the result of experience and
reflection. Having as yet only wandered around the edges of the sacred
groves of wisdom where these pitiless teachers break the sweet shackles
of their pupils, he still thought the thoughts of childhood and
instinctively obeyed the injunction of Emerson, to "reverence the dreams
of our youth," and the admonition of Richter, that "when we cease to do
so, then dies the man in us." Whatever might have been the real nature
of these emotional experiences, no one doubted that they possessed a
genuine reality of some kind or other, for it was a matter of history in
this little community that David Corson had often exercised prophetic,
mesmeric and therapeutic powers.

The life of this young man had been pure and uneventful. Existence in
this frontier region, once full of the tragedy of Indian warfare, had
been gradually softened by peace and religion. The passions slowly
kindling in the struggle over slavery had not yet burst into flame, and
this particular valley was even more quiet than others because it had