insoluble. The young man's conversation not only thus excites your
fancies,--it disturbs your affections. He speaks not only of drugs that
renew youth, but of charms that secure love. You tremble for your Lilian
while you hear him! And the brain thus tasked, the imagination thus
inflamed, the heart thus agitated, you are presented to Sir Philip Derval,
whose ghost your patient had supposed he saw weeks ago.

"This person, a seeker after an occult philosophy, which had possibly
acquainted him with some secrets in nature beyond the pale of our
conventional experience, though, when analyzed, they might prove to be
quite reconcilable with sober science, startles you with an undefined
mysterious charge against the young man who had previously seemed to you
different from ordinary mortals. In a room stored with the dead things of
the brute soulless world, your brain becomes intoxicated with the fumes of
some vapour which produces effects not uncommon in the superstitious
practices of the East; your brain, thus excited, brings distinctly before
you the vague impressions it had before received. Margrave becomes
identified with the Louis Grayle of whom you had previously heard an
obscure and, legendary tale, and all the anomalies in his character are
explained by his being that which you had contended, in your physiological
work, it was quite possible for man to be,--namely, mind and body without
soul! You were startled by the monster which man would be were your own
theory possible; and in order to reconcile the contradictions in this very
monster, you account for knowledge, and for powers that mind without soul
could not have attained, by ascribing to this prodigy broken memories of a
former existence, demon attributes from former proficiency in evil magic.
My friend, there is nothing here which your own study of morbid
idiosyncracies should not suffice to solve."

"So, then," said I, "you would reduce all that have affected my senses as