CHAPTER IX

A FAITH-HEALER

It was in those days that there suddenly came wafted to us across the ocean the tidings of a wondrous discovery, a strange new pursuit for pastime,--I scarce know what to call it,--a new method of healing and new branch of scientific research, some would say, though certainly in this last particular it has not yet justified its claims to be admitted to rank as a science, but has like that other dark mysterious agent, electricity, of which we also know so little, to this day advanced but little beyond the infantile stage. Animal magnetism, table-turning, spirit-rapping, thought-reading and psychography, each and all of these names have been used in turn to designate the various manifestations of this hitherto unknown, or it may be merely neglected and forgotten force.

Now with regard to the phenomena I am about to describe, there could perhaps scarce be a more accurate and trustworthy witness than a child of nine years, absolutely healthy in mind and body, and bringing the quick observation and clear untroubled gaze of childhood to bear on these strange occurrences, without preconceived leanings towards belief or doubt, and even probably with a little less curiosity than might have belonged to one a few years older. To so young a child, the whole world is a subject of perpetual awe and wonder, nearly every incident in its daily experience being startling and inexplicable, yet all accepted alike in the same spirit of implicit good faith. Was there then after all, in these new occurrences that set everyone talking, anything so much more wonderful than in a hundred others with which we were already familiar? Were we not acquainted with the miracle of the caterpillar’s metamorphosis to the butterfly, of the transformation of the blossom into fruit? And could there be anything at once more natural and more terrible than those frightful spasms that racked my mother’s whole frame, paralysing every movement of her limbs? That this never struck us as anything unusual or uncommon was shown by my answer to another little girl, who had asked me to suggest a new game.--“Let us play at being mother and child,” I promptly replied, “and you shall be the mother, and must sit still in this chair, as you cannot walk about.” And I was honestly surprised both at my little companion’s astonishment and also to hear my mother’s voice calling to me from the next room, enquiring if I thought that a nice sort of game, to be making fun of my mother’s ill-health? I was dreadfully discomfited, but I had meant no harm at all, it simply arose from the impossibility of dissociating in my own mind the idea of one’s mother from that of being lame. I had seen too how completely medical science had been at fault, just with those of my own family who had been obliged to have recourse to the doctors’ skill, one celebrated practitioner after another having tried in vain to bring about some improvement in my father’s health, or to find out a course of treatment that should alleviate my mother’s sufferings, and bring some relief to the constant pain that made my younger brother’s life a martyrdom. It was perhaps the reiterated failure of any of the old recognised methods to work a cure, that rendered us all quite free from prejudice against the pretensions of outsiders, and hearing so much said of the wonderful cures wrought by magnetism, I felt no surprise when I learnt that it was to be tried in my mother’s case. Soon the professional magnetiser appeared upon the scene, in the person of a very stout Englishwoman with beady black eyes, to whom my brothers and I immediately took an intense dislike, on account of her appearance and her very disagreeable manner towards us. Her skill did procure for my mother a little of the rest she stood so much in need of, as the operator could by means of the magnetic passes, or even by merely laying her hand on the patient’s forehead, send her for hours into a deep sleep, from which she could not awake of her own accord. But the fact that the magnetiser had, as she boasted, herself brought fifteen children into the world, had not apparently imbued her with very tender feelings towards children in general, and the influence she was not slow in acquiring over her patient she so thoroughly abused in tyrannising over us, that we three cordially detested her, and were thankful when a too glaring usurpation of authority led to her summary dismissal. Her brief stay in our midst had, however, awakened among us all the desire to ascertain by similar experiments, what latent magnetic power might possibly reside in some of us, and it was very soon shown that my uncle, Nicholas of Nassau, was possessed of a quite exceptional degree of the mesmeric or hypnotic force, which he, a lively, thoughtless youth of twenty, did not scruple to use for all sorts of practical jokes. A favourite one was to prevent his sister’s governess from getting up out of her chair; do what she would, she was as if nailed down to it whenever he chose to forbid her to rise, and he would even sometimes mount his horse and ride away for a couple of hours, deaf to the entreaties and adjurations of his victim. Another time he ordered her to put out her tongue, in the midst of a ceremonious Court dinner, and almost crying with indignation, she was forced to obey. His sisters found it equally impossible to disobey whatever extravagant commands he might lay on them, such as forcing my mother to stand still holding out her hand whilst he threatened to aim a heavy blow at it with his riding-whip. Such displays of his extraordinary and inexplicable powers afforded great amusement to himself and others, above all to the child spectators, who laughed heartily to see their elders for once reduced to such submissiveness. It was therefore a sad disappointment to us when, in consequence of the fits of hysterics into which one or two ladies had been thrown by some of my uncle’s pranks, he was obliged to desist from them. We little ones had enjoyed them the more, that he never tried them on us, from whom it would indeed have been superfluous to exact obedience in this fashion, trained as we were to carry out unquestioningly and with military promptness and exactitude, whatever orders were given us. For this was in the old days, when it seemed to be a recognised thing, that children had come into the world just to do what they were told, and learn whatever was taught them! Nobody thought of asking them if they found it a tedious restraint to behave properly, nor were they consulted as to whether their lessons bored them. If in my youthful days, for instance, I played badly in my piano-lesson, it was so much the worse for me, as I soon found out, when the music-master had gone. As for over-pressure, the word had not been invented then, and nervous fatigue, hysteria and neurasthenia, with all of which the modern child is familiar, had not yet been heard of. Our elders certainly themselves set us a good example in all such respects, and I can remember the severe animadversion passed on the poor degenerate creatures who first indulged in the above unbecoming weaknesses. All through her married life my grandmother had to stand every evening with her ladies, in full dress upright beside the billiard-table, to watch her lord and master’s play, and neither she nor anyone else dared to be tired or feel bored, until the match was finished. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that people in those days knew how to be bored to death with the utmost decorum! There were no comfortable easy-chairs to lean back in; if one sat down at all, it was bolt upright on a chair of most uncompromising severity. For our lessons we had very hard high wooden chairs, from which our poor little legs dangled till they ached, very different from the nice comfortable schoolroom chairs with their foot-rest, which children have now. And worst of all, there was the dreadful invention for deportment, a horrible heart-shaped contrivance, of iron covered with leather, into which we were strapped to make us hold ourselves upright. To my indescribable humiliation, I was sometimes obliged to go for a walk with the odious machine fastened to my back. Even this seemed quite mild though, compared to the means employed in a former generation, one of my great-aunts being able to tell of the spiked collar, which in addition to the iron back-board, she was forced to wear, to prevent her from ever allowing her head to droop. Was it the effect of this instrument of torture, that in her ninetieth year, she had never been known to lean back in her chair?

Out of this hard training, of this undue repression, and as a natural consequence too of the incessant cupping and bleeding, practised on the former generation as a remedy for all existent and non-existent maladies, there came forth another, debilitated, unnerved, an easy prey to the whole host of nervous disorders lying in wait for it. I have lived through and looked on at every phase of the transformation. Healthy as I was, I should hardly have escaped the drastic measures to which the so-called plethoric were subjected, had it not been sufficiently proved that their application had been injurious rather than beneficial to my mother. The immense strides made by medical science of recent years, make it difficult to judge rightly the mental attitude of those, who in their impatience of the inanity and futility of orthodox treatment, seem formerly to have welcomed and blindly followed the advice of every quack, calling himself a mesmeriser. We should be slower to condemn them, had we also suffered from the ignorance and incompetence of the regular practitioner, and perhaps be equally willing to sign a pact with the Evil One and his agents, in order to regain the blessing of health! It was this tendency that led to the first great disappointment of my life, which I experienced when I was only five years old, in the following manner:

I had a little birth-mark on my left cheek, which was a great source of vexation to my parents, nobody understanding in those days how to remove anything of the sort. They were therefore all the more readily disposed to put faith in the assertion of a wandering charlatan, of his ability to make it disappear. I was fetched from my lessons by my father, placed in a chair, and the stranger proceeded to apply a dark fluid from a little phial to the spot, assuring my parents that when this had dried up, they would find on its removal no trace of the mole left. Somehow or other I had understood that by means of this magical process, I should never be naughty again. As might be expected, when the stain of the fluid was washed away, the mole was there just as before, with a slight scar into the bargain, and I was as naughty as ever! That was my first real big disappointment. The next came when I was six, with my first glimpse of the sea. When we reached the shore to go on board the boat, it was low tide, and instead of the wide far-reaching plain of water I was prepared to see, there was nothing but sand, with a few pools. To my mother’s apostrophe,--“Look, Elizabeth! there is the sea!” I could not find a word to say in reply, I was too bitterly disappointed. I had expected to behold a great towering wall of water, like that I was familiar with in the pictures of the crossing of the Red Sea by the Children of Israel. And here was nothing but sand, with a few wretched pools! Afterwards I saw the great expanse of water, always in movement, and stretching out far away, but it was too late then, the first impression was over and all was spoilt. The third disappointment came much later, at first sight of Rome, and does not belong here.

To return to my story. In one of my uncle’s letters from America, he told us of his visit to a house, where the guests were all amusing themselves by setting a table in motion by simply letting their hands rest lightly on it, as they stood round. It had interested him, but he had not been able to induce my father to take any part in the proceedings, the latter declining even to countenance such nonsense, declaring himself the enemy of every sort of humbug. At home, on the contrary, curiosity was immediately aroused, our former experience with the magnetiser and the discovery of my uncle’s marvellous powers, having to a certain extent initiated us into the mysteries of the occult. Young and old, children and grown-up people, we were all pressed into the service, and were soon all standing in a ring round a very big table, our hands resting on it, so that one’s little finger touched that of one’s neighbour on either side. Thus we stood and waited, with some impatience, and a good deal of inward merriment, to see what would occur. Just as we were getting thoroughly disheartened and tired out, a tiny tremor was felt in the table, which then, in spite of its great weight, actually began to move from the spot. Naturally, each one accused the other of pushing, but that explanation would have been neither satisfactory nor admissible, standing as we were with our hands in full view of one another, so that no attempt at cheating could have passed unperceived. And our astonishment was increased when we observed how when my mother was wheeled into the room, she had but to lay her finger ever so lightly on the table, for it at once to begin to move quicker, even setting off to rush about in all directions, so that she had to be pushed after it in her chair. We all followed, with peals of laughter at the strange sight, the ungainly movements of this new sort of dancing-bear, and so much amusement did this afford, that we set to work at once to experiment on all sorts of other inanimate objects. We soon found that all were not in the same degree susceptible of locomotion, nor were all human beings equally endowed with the latent force by which automatic movement could be imparted to things usually inert. Count Oriola proved to be the possessor of a quite exceptional degree of this psychic or magnetic force; he had only to stretch out his hand within a few paces of a small table, and it immediately came marching towards him, apparently with great glee, to our inexpressible delight, but to the unspeakable horror of my governess, from whose sitting-room the table had been borrowed, and who energetically refused to receive such an impish piece of furniture back again!

Not only tables, but chairs, sofas, all sorts of things seemed now suddenly to have become capable of walking about; it was even told of a young girl staying in our house, that holding her hand over a big glass shade that covered a clock, to her surprise the shade lifted itself up in the air to reach her hand, and remained for a time firmly fixed to it. Naturally enough, the thing being once admitted in principle, its possibility established beyond a doubt, there were no bounds, no limits to our curiosity, and every other form of amusement was cast into the background by this. It was much more interesting than simple mesmerising, and instead of being like that confined to an experiment on one person at a time, in this all could take part. We moreover obtained the proof that the force by which these results were obtained, was not entirely confined to certain more highly-favoured individuals, but lay in some degree latent in everyone, and could be immensely developed by practice. Nor was this ever attended with the least inconvenience to the experimenter, an effort of the will, a certain tension and concentration of mind, being the chief conditions of success. It was, however, also of great moment that such experiments should be undertaken in a proper spirit, _i.e._, seriously, with a real desire to investigate their nature and to turn them to the advantage of one’s fellow-beings, for we soon noticed that those who treated the matter as a mere joke, approaching it in a frivolous mood, generally failed in all they attempted. As might be expected, the persons whose fund of magnetism was most considerable, proved also to be those who could most easily induce in others the magnetic trance. All seemed to resolve itself into that one process of mental concentration, and someone remarked that this word “concentration” was the one most often heard, and that formulated the rule of life and scheme of education in our family. Perhaps I owe it to the habit acquired then, that I am never absent-minded, but always able to concentrate my thoughts on the matter in hand, and taking into consideration my lively imagination, I think this may be looked upon as an educational triumph!

Whilst “concentration” was thus the order of the day among us, it happened that my mother heard of the marvellous cures, recalling those told of in the Bible, being worked in Paris by a “Faith-healer,” as we should certainly now call him, since they were effected by no other means than the simple laying-on of hands. One of the patients then under treatment, and making rapid progress, was Schleiermacher’s daughter, Countess Schwerin, whose case so nearly resembled my mother’s own, that the latter could not refrain from writing to tell my father all she had heard, with the result that on his way home from America he stopped in Paris, to make further enquiries. He called on the magnetiser, whose name was Count Szápary, and begged him to undertake my mother’s case. This request met at first with a decided refusal, it being impossible for him, the Count stated, to abandon for a new patient the many now being treated by him, these being, moreover, already so numerous that he could not think of adding to them. He did, however, in the end so far modify his refusal, as to promise that in the course of a journey he was about to take, and which should lead him Rhinewards, he would certainly pay my mother a visit, and see what could be done for her.

Three days had not yet passed over our heads in Bonn since my father’s return, when the little garden gate was suddenly flung open by a stranger of distinguished presence--in spite of a slight limp (the result, we afterwards learned, of a carriage accident, some time previous, in Hungary)--and in whose thick dark moustache the first silvery threads were beginning to appear, though not yet in the rather long and wavy thick dark hair, a lock of which, escaping, was continually falling over his forehead. My father went forward to meet this gentleman, whom he introduced as Count Szápary, and who brought the scrutinising glance of his big black eyes to bear on our little group, with but little, at first sight it seemed, of the kindly smile which on better intimacy lit up his face so constantly. His own wonderful powers, which he was now bent on using for the good of mankind, had been revealed to him by chance, some might call it, in reality by his despairing efforts to procure by mesmerism the boon of sleep and respite from pain for an invalid daughter, given up by the regular doctor. To his glad astonishment, not only did the magnetic passes send the patient into a refreshing slumber, but a repetition of the experiment was equally successful, and, being persevered with, in time restored her to health. In his gratitude for his child’s life being spared, the father determined to use his gift henceforth for the benefit of others, and in order to cultivate it systematically, he went to Paris to study medicine for a time, and establishing himself there, the cures wrought by him were very soon widely talked of. There was a minute of suspense as the thoughtful, enquiring glance rested on my mother, and we trembled lest the objections urged against my father’s pleadings in Paris should still be maintained. But at that critical moment, poor little Otto happened to join us, and again the sharp restless eyes travelled from the sorely tried young mother to the unhappy child, and back again to the pale, emaciated father, already in a rapid decline, and all hesitation was at an end. The spectacle of so much suffering was decisive for the man whose whole life was given up to alleviating human misery. Without further demur he agreed to devote his time, his skill, to the case before him. “But,” he hastened to add, after a rapid examination of his patient, “your life I can perhaps save, more I cannot say, I cannot promise that you will ever recover the use of your limbs!” And indeed at that time it looked as if the one leg were completely atrophied, it was as if withered--literally reduced to skin and bone. When our new friend took his leave, it was with the promise to return in a very few weeks’ time, to accompany us himself to Paris, as he feared that without him my mother might not even survive the journey.

So we set out for Paris, my brother Wilhelm and I in one railway compartment with tutor and governess, Otto in another for himself with his faithful attendant, our good old nurse, and my mother in hers, in the hammock slung for her, with my father and Fräulein von Preen close at hand, and Count Szápary standing beside her, steadying the hammock with the one hand, whilst with the other he continued uninterruptedly making the mesmeric passes, to still the frightful paroxysms of pain, which almost threatened to prove fatal during the journey. Terrible as it was, it yet differed from former journeys undertaken under like circumstances, in the absence of the overpowering smell of chloral, ether, and other medicaments, for all such were from this moment abolished and never heard of more. It was not astonishing, when we did arrive safely and were installed in the house taken for us in the Champs Elysées, that directly he had seen his patient carried upstairs and put to bed, Count Szápary should have sought his own room, and falling exhausted on his bed, have slept on without waking for ten hours.

Next day began the treatment--no easy matter, as my mother’s extreme weakness made it necessary to proceed with the utmost precaution, and Count Szápary afterwards owned that he had more than once feared that she might die while undergoing it. But he persevered, and was rewarded at the end of six months by perceiving a faint twitching in the toes of the till then apparently lifeless foot. “Ah! you will be able to walk again after all!” he exclaimed in his delight, and continued the massage so vigorously and to such good purpose, that life seemed to return gradually to the whole of the paralysed limb, and in the course of a few weeks the patient could actually take a few steps. Only a very few at first, leaning on her companion’s arm, and with the tears streaming down her cheeks with the effort and the pain, sometimes severe enough to make her faint away before it was over. But through it all she could see us watching her, the first time she was taken into the garden, and she told us afterwards of our anxious faces, mine flushed with excitement as I ran towards her, whilst Wilhelm turned deadly pale as he tried to move away every little pebble in her way in the path. Then, a few days later, Otto also was allowed to look on, and for him it was something even more solemn and wonderful, for it was the first time in his life that he had seen his mother able to walk a step. Without a word he went up to her, took her by the hand, and walked slowly beside her the whole time, in perfect silence. For all of us it was the grandest and most impressive event of our whole childhood, something that seemed to partake of the nature of a miracle, and that brought the stories of miraculous cures in times of old quite near to us, making them a more living reality than to most people, since we had ourselves with our own eyes witnessed something similar in the person of one so near and dear to us. It will readily be believed, that our admiration and gratitude for him who had wrought this marvel knew no bounds. To say that we looked upon him as a saint, seems but a feeble expression of the feeling of veneration with which we regarded him.

Of the actual working of the cure, of the mode of treatment, we saw nothing, and heard but little; I only know that little by little, the terrible convulsions were transformed into regular exercise of the muscles, in fact into an involuntary process of therapeutic gymnastics. In course of time, not only was the cure complete, but her own fund of natural magnetism had been discovered to be so exceptional, that my mother was anxious to celebrate her restoration to health by performing a like good work for others, and began visiting Count Szápary’s other patients with him, undertaking a portion of the treatment. At her pressing invitation the lame Fräulein von Bunsen came to stay with us, and thanks to the combined efforts of my mother and Count Szápary, she also was set on her feet again and able to walk after being for five-and-twenty years considered beyond all hope of recovery!

For my mother it was the beginning of a new life in more meanings than one, for it was now her turn, after her own miraculous cure, to cultivate and turn to account in the service of humanity, the gift bestowed upon her unawares. She perhaps never became quite so strong as had been at first hoped, and, in fact, she often felt far from well, but the lameness never returned. And it very soon became clearly established, that the possession of magnetic force by no means corresponds to our physical strength or indeed to our bodily health. Concerning this, very thorough investigations were made by my father, who would not have tolerated the idea of anything being done by his wife which could possibly have been harmful to her own health. On that point there could be no shadow of doubt; our experiments in mesmerising and table-turning furnishing constant examples of the presence of these powers in a transcendent degree in persons of specially fragile build and constitutional delicacy. It was just by these that feats were accomplished, which would not merely have taxed their ordinary strength, but would have been impossible to the strongest man. All this will no longer seem so very surprising at the present day, but the period I deal with is of fifty years ago, when these marvels were not yet subjects of common parlance. No Charcot had yet made his experiments with suggestion and hypnotism; indeed, the very names were scarcely known. My father, who was so little inclined to credulity that friends and relations had dubbed him the unbelieving Thomas, gave himself up to the serious study of the question. His naturally philosophic bent found here ample matter for reflection. “I have not the dogmatic arrogance,” he was accustomed to say, “which would enable me to deny the existence of phenomena, simply because I fail to comprehend them!” Investigating them in this spirit, from the purely scientific point of view, he acquired the conviction that they were manifestations of an inner life, the proof of a persistence of thought independent of cerebral cognition, and he therefore gave to the book he wrote on the subject, the title, “Subconscious Mental Life.” I am aware that the theory he upheld is now much contested, that there are those who, while they do not dispute the genuineness of the manifestations, would ascribe them to quite another cause, looking upon them as of purely objective nature, and entirely independent of the medium. Time alone can decide which of these two schools of psychical research is the better justified. Then, at all events, it had not yet occurred to any of us to seek the explanation of these phenomena from without, everything appearing sufficiently to demonstrate their origin in our own mentality; a belief which did not, however, in the least preclude our full recognition of the superiority of the results achieved, to all similar performances by the same individual in the normal state. Our experiments were now no longer confined to mere spirit-rapping or observations made on subjects during the mesmeric trance; they were henceforth specially directed to psychography, and with the most gratifying results. It was perhaps the manifestations in this higher sphere which overcame the last barriers of my father’s incredulity; the simple manner in which they were obtained, by means of a pencil, passed through a large woollen ball, on which two persons placed their hands, absolutely preventing any possibility of fraud. Very often he made the experiment himself, together with one other person, generally a young girl whose store of magnetism was known to be above the average, and he was able thus to convince himself that the movements of the pencil, tracing characters with lightning rapidity in its course across the paper, were entirely independent of human agency.

Questions of deepest import were asked, answers on subjects either of private or of general interest obtained, and many a philosophic doubt laid to rest, by this spirit-writing. And these messages, I cannot sufficiently repeat, seemed to have as a rule little in common with the mental powers or culture of the person through whom they were transmitted, being on an altogether different plane, a higher intellectual level than that of society in general. Certainly no means was neglected of raising the tone of conversation among the ever-widening circle of friends who assembled for these _séances_; all frivolous chatter was banished, gossip was a thing utterly unknown, and it is hardly too much to say, that it was in a well-nigh religious spirit that most of us gathered round the table on which the manifestations took place. Among the guests in our house, was the aged musician, Neukomm, and very often, as a preliminary to the evening’s proceedings, he would seat himself at the organ, and by a soft and solemn prelude would induce in all present a frame of mind suitable to the solemnity of the occasion. As I was now in my twelfth year, and my mind unusually developed for my age, I was allowed to participate in all that went on. Above all, I loved to hear my father talk of those philosophic questions that occupied his own thoughts, and it was from this time that dated the delightful long walks we took together, in which he instructed me in the history of philosophy, explaining to me the various philosophic systems, and reading to me passages from his own writings, thereby giving me my first insight into the metaphysical problems in which his soul took refuge from the noise and bustle of the world. His dream it doubtless was, to make of me a philosopher like himself, and his enthusiasm and earnestness could not fail to arouse my interest in the themes on which he waxed so eloquent; but my own bent was a different one--the field of metaphysical speculation, as thrown open to me by my beloved and revered father, might well entice my spirit awhile,--my sojourn there could be but brief, it was in another dreamland I was eventually to find my home, and already, unknown to everyone, I had made my first excursions, my first timid flights within those realms. Everything I heard, everything I saw, each fresh addition to my store of knowledge, each wonderful revelation of the world above and beyond the perception of the senses, into which it was our privilege to obtain a glimpse by the marvellous experiences chronicled above--all this did but furnish material for my active imagination, and was absorbed, and pondered over, and woven into the intangible, unsubstantial fabric of many a future song. Meantime, the influences of the hour were naturally all-powerful in magnifying the veneration in which I held my parents. It was in truth no ordinary every-day existence which they led; and that which was most remarkable was the perfect harmony in aim and action of these two so dissimilar natures, and their admirable co-operation in furthering the well-being of their fellow-creatures, the special gifts of each being employed to the same end, my father’s theoretically, my mother’s in the direction of practical utility. Of the cures which the latter was enabled to work, I shall tell elsewhere; suffice it to say in this place, that they were effected with a swiftness, and attended with circumstances so remarkable as to surpass if anything those of Szápary himself. In later years, when the extraordinary cures wrought by Metzger and other masseurs were spoken of in my mother’s presence, it did not astonish anyone who knew her that she should calmly remark, with a pitying smile--“That is all very well, but it is nothing to what I could do! I had but to stretch out my hand and say--Rise up, thou art healed!”

The somnambulistic experiments I witnessed were perhaps more marvellous than all the rest. It would almost seem as if in the case of the somnambulist the law of gravitation were abolished, so entirely free from the trammels of material existence does the human body appear to be while in this state. Certainly my mother often appeared to us no longer to tread the earth, she seemed to float rather than walk, and any further and more complete abolition of what we are accustomed to term the laws of nature, would assuredly have occasioned among us no surprise at all. No amount of familiarity, on the other hand, could ever do away with the feeling of awe, with which my mother’s ecstatic trance invariably inspired us. Unconscious of all around, she sang and prayed--the words and melody alike of her own composition; it was a deeply moving spectacle.

Brought up in an atmosphere so highly charged with the marvellous, it has ever been impossible to me to assume a sceptical attitude towards mysteries which elude my comprehension. The word supernatural seems to me to be an absolute contradiction in terms. Who are we that we should dare to set limits to the forces of nature, and to decide that this or that occurrence is beyond her control? Did we but understand such events aright, we must needs acknowledge them to be perfectly natural. Egyptian priests of old, and Indian fakirs of the present day may alike laugh us to scorn, that in our ignorance and impotence we presume to question the existence of forces whose workings they have fathomed and turned to such good account. Recourse to the supernatural is but a return to nature. For this reason it may well be that outside the domain of surgery, wherein such incontestable triumphs have been achieved, of the whole of our modern medical practice the so-called nature-cures will in the end alone survive. They rest indeed on a purely rational basis, the treatment being none other than the art of transforming pathological phenomena into therapeutical processes.

I refer of course to the treatment I have myself seen practised and to the examples quoted here. The system made considerable demands on the goodwill and concurrence of the patient, these being, in the opinion of Count Szápary, indispensable conditions of its success. An entirely different principle is acted upon, I am aware, by those who practise massage at the present day. With them the patient remains entirely passive, and the massage itself is alone supposed to work the cure. I will not enter into the question of the respective merits of the two systems, I would merely point out the benefit that accrued to the patient from the independence to which he was encouraged by the earlier one. All who had sufficient energy to follow the prescribed path, were able in course of time to continue the treatment alone, whilst such as were found incapable of making the necessary effort for recovery, and disposed to fall into a morbid state of dependence on the doctor, were dismissed as a hindrance to the others. Every phase of illness was treated as a stepping-stone to progress, every symptom turned to account; the somnambulistic trance, for instance, was made use of as a stage in the transition from sickness to health, a state of repose deeper and more refreshing than ordinary sleep, during which by no other means than the rest prescribed by nature, the weakened frame and overstrung nerves might recover their equilibrium. Every step in the treatment was accompanied by prayer; it bore indeed from first to last a markedly religious character. All the members of our little circle felt themselves lifted above the common wants and desires of humanity by the nobler prospects which the wider horizon opened out before them; we were as neophytes whom some rite of initiation sets apart for holier purposes. It was difficult to live invariably on that exalted level, the circumstances might not always be propitious, and on myself they seemed sometimes to bear too heavily. It was the sight of so much suffering, the perpetual intercourse with invalids, that preyed on my spirits and against which my own youthful health and strength could at times scarce react. But at such moments my mother’s iron discipline stood me in good stead. I had been so well drilled, and had my feelings under such perfect control, that neither to her nor anyone else, and scarce even to myself would I ever have acknowledged that life had sometimes become a burden to me. I knew that for the sake of others I must keep a smiling face, and do my best to cheer them, whatever my own sadness.

Count Szápary was always cheerful, or at any rate always wore an appearance of cheerfulness, laughing and singing with the joviality of a true Hungarian, and rejoicing in magnificent health and strength. This doubtless aided him to give confidence to his patients, who must have been trying at times with their whims and caprices. It has been given to few to benefit their fellow-creatures to a like extent, or to reap the harvest of benedictions that will forever blossom round his name.