indications of future greatness, is dead. The malaria killed him.
But he had a father, who, while alive, had loved his son as the
apple of his eye, and whose whole being and desire centred in the boy.
This father died some six years ago, about the age of sixty. After
his death his devotion to the youth continued, and as a "spirit,"
he followed him everywhere, never quitting his side. So entirely
was he absorbed in the lad and in his career, that he made no advance
in his own spiritual life, nor, indeed, was he fully aware of the
fact that he had himself quitted the earthly plane. For there are
souls which, having been obtuse and dull in their apprehension of
spiritual things during their existence in the flesh, and having
neither hopes nor aims beyond the body, are very slow to realise
the fact of their dissolution, and remain, therefore, chained to
the earth by earthly affections and interests, haunting the places
or persons they have most affected. But the young artist was not of
this order. Idealist and genius, he was already highly spiritualised
and vitalised even upon earth, and when death rent the bond between
him and his body, he passed at once from the atmosphere of carnal
things into a loftier sphere. But at the moment of his death, the
phantom father was watching beside the son's sick-bed, and filled
with agony at beholding the wreck of all the brilliant hopes he
had cherished for the boy, thought only of preserving the physical
life of that dear body, since the death of the outward form was
still for him the death of all he had loved. He would cling to it,
preserve it, re-animate it at any cost. The spirit had quitted it;
it lay before him a corpse. What, then, did the father do? With
a supreme effort of desire, ineffectual indeed to recall the departed
ghost, but potent in its reaction upon himself, he projected his
own vitality into his son's dead body, re-animated it with his own
soul, and thus effected the resuscitation for which he had so