second floor a gentle knock on the bottom stair. His improvement, therefore, has been decided and permanent, and is entirely attributable to hypnotism, as no other means were adopted in his case." In other words, the cure was entirely attributable to that special form of mental activity which is excited, or, at any rate, becomes available, in the case of hypnotized patients.

66

We have seen how, through the influence of the mind upon the body, the blind have been made to see, the deaf to hear; we may next consider cases in which the lame have been made to walk -nay, even to dance-by no other influence. Among the experiments by which it was shown that wooden tractors are as effective, if only they are properly painted, as iron ones, Dr. Alderson mentions the the following: Robert Wood, aged 67, on June 4 was operated upon with wooden tractors for a rheumatic affection of the hip, which he had had for eight months. During the application of the tractors, which was continued for about seven minutes, no effects were produced, except a profuse perspiration and a general tremor. On ceasing the application of the tractors, to his inexpressible joy and our satisfaction, the good effects of our labor were now produced and acknowledged; for he voluntarily assured me that he could walk with perfect ease, that he had the entire motion of the joint, and that he was free from pain-to use his own words: As to the pain I have now, I do not care if I have it all my life; that will matter nothing. You may take your medicines-I'll have no more of them!' And prior to his leaving the infirmary, he remarked how very warm those parts were where the tractors had been applied; and then walked from the infirmary to his own house, assuring his companion that he could very well walk to Beverley." In another case no tractors were used, or any other mysterious form of apparatus employed to excite attention; the attraction used was not magnetic nor electrical, but an attraction of a very different kind, not as yet considered among medical remediesexcept, by the way, in one case which occurs to us at the moment, and will be found fully recorded, prescription and all, in the pages of Hard Cash, though

the remedy is there prescribed to cure an ailment for which it seems in some degree more appropriate. A young lady of sixteen (we are describing a real case, not the case of Julia Dodd) had for many months been suffering from an inversion of the left foot, which was twisted at right angles with the other, and was treated by orthopedic surgeons with an elaborate apparatus of splints. Neither they, nor Mr. Skey (though he recognized the nature of the affection), succeeded in curing it. Psychical agents, however, effected a cure in a few minutes. She willed to use her foot like other people, and she did." She accompanied her family to a ball," says Mr. Skey, in the Medical Times and Gazette for October 13, 1866; “her foot, as she entered the ball-room, being not yet restored to its normal position. She was invited to dance, and, under this novel excitement, she stood up, and to the astonishment of her family she danced the whole evening, having almost suddenly recovered the healthy muscular action of the limb. She came to see me two days afterward. She walked perfectly well into my room, and paced the room backward and forward with great delight. The actions of the limb were thoroughly restored, and all trace of the previous malady had disappeared."

After reading such accounts as these, accounts given by soberly-minded medical men, who would naturally be inclined rather to limit unduly than unduly to exaggerate the power which the mind of the patient may possess over the diseased body, it becomes easy to explain the accounts of seemingly miraculous cures which are published from time to time in various religious (and also in some scarcely religious) journals. Amongst such cases we may cite as particularly credible, when once the influence of the imagination is recognized, the so-called miracles performed by Prince Hohenlohe, for he combined with the princely title* and the imagined efficacy of royal

blood, the attributes of the priest, and personal qualities admirably suited to influence the minds of the weaker sort of men. In one case certainly in which he cured a man of deafness, his princely position can hardly have helped him much, for the man was also a prince of the blood-Louis, ex-King of Bavaria. Louis's letter describing his own cure, and other wonders, is very curious. It is addressed to Count von Sinsheim. "My dear Count," he says, "there are still miracles. The ten last days of the last month, the people of Würzburg might believe themselves in the times of the Apostles. The deaf heard, the blind saw, the lame freely walked, not by the aid of art, but by a few short prayers. .. On the evening of the 28th, the number of persons cured of both sexes, and of every age, amounted to more than twenty. These were of all classes of the people, from the humblest to a prince of the blood; who, without any exterior means, recovered, on the 27th, at noon, the hearing which he had lost from his infancy. This cure was effected by a prayer made for him, during some minutes, by a priest, who is scarcely more than twenty-seven years of age -the Prince Hohenlohe. Although I do not hear so well as the majority of the persons who are about me, there is no comparison between my actual state and that which existed before. Besides, I perceive daily that I hear more clearly.

his death many who went lame to his tomb left their crutches there. It was not necessary that the patient should be of the worthy father's persuasion in religion. Many staunch Protestants were cured by him, as they supposed; but in reality by processes taking place within their own minds, and initiated by their own lively imaginations. Whether after cure such persons remained as staunchly Protestant as they had been before, we do not know.*

In a similar way may be explanied (or rather, must be explained, when due account is taken of the weight of evidence) many cases in which maledictions seem to have taken effect, as by a miracle. Paralysis, which has been often cured by faith, has been produced, though less often, by terror. In the Medical Gazette for May 23, 1868, there is a report of a singular case which occurred at the Limerick Sessions. Two men had been charged with having assaulted a relative. "The prosecutor summoned his own father as a witness. The mother of the prisoners, exasperated at the prospect of her sons being-sent to prison on the evidence of her own relative, gave expression to her feeling in a malediction, praying that when the old man left the witness-box he might be paralyzed, and paralyzed he was accordingly, and had to be taken to the hospital. Such miraculous illness not yielding readily to ordinary modes of treatment, the old lady has been requested to remove her curse by spitting on the patient, but this she sternly refuses to do, and the man remains in the hospital." Unfortunately, the end of the story was not given. It would have been pleasing to learn that in the long run the old dame relented,

faith in Father Matthew (not in teetotalism, be it understood); and even after

lohe was born in 1794, in Waldenburg, and educated in several universities. He officiated as priest at Olmütz, Munich, etc. "When twenty-six," Dr. Todd adds, "he met with a peasant who had performed several astonishing cures, and from him caught the enthusiasm which he subsequently manifested in curing the sick. He constantly appealed to their faith in his power."

* We were told a few months ago by a wor

sent for on one occasion to administer the sacrament of extreme unction to a Protestant lady, who (not knowing that Catholicity was an essential preliminary) hoped to find in the sacrament a cure for an attack of inflammation of the bowels, which the doctors had in vain attempted to assuage. They hourly expected her death. Finding no other course open to her, she "made submission," was received into the Church, and the sacrament of extreme unction was administered. When next the family doctor called the lady was well, save for the state of weakness to which many hours of extreme pain had reduced her.

and by spitting on the invalid restored him to health, for then the evidence of the influence of imagination would be complete.

Many will recall here the story of "Goody Blake and Harry Gill.” Although Wordsworth calls this "a true story," yet most persons probably imagine that, as related by the poet, it is in a large degree a work of fiction. That Wordsworth himself regarded the punishment of the hard farmer as wrought by supernatural means is well known, and comes out clearly on a comparison between his poetic version of the event and the terse prosaic narrative by Dr. Erasmus Darwin in his Zoonomia. Yet the story was true enough in all essential points as told by Wordsworth. The elder Darwin's account of the case runs simply thus: "A young farmer in Warwickshire, finding his hedges broken and the sticks carried away, during a frosty season, determined to watch for the thief. He lay many cold hours under a haystack, and at length an old woman, like a witch in a play, approached and began to pull up the hedge; he waited till she had tied up her bottle of sticks, and was carrying them off, that he might convict her of the theft, and then springing from his concealment he seized his prey with violent threats. After some altercation, in which her load was left upon the ground, she kneeled upon the bottle" (sic, it is the old-fashioned word for a "bundle")" of sticks, and raising her arms to heaven beneath the bright moon, then at the full, spoke to the farmer, already shivering with cold, Heaven grant that thou mayest never know again the blessing to be warm.' He complained of cold all the next day, and wore an upper coat, and in a few days another, and in a fortnight took to his bed, always saying nothing made him warm; he covered himself with very many blankets, and had a sieve over his face as he lay" (the benefit expected from this arrangement is not altogether obvious); "and from this one and from this one insane idea he kept his bed above twenty years, for fear of the cold air, til at length he died. It was unfortunate for him, by the way, that Turkish baths had not been introduced into England in his time! For probably if he had tried the radiating room of a Turkish

ue.

hammam, he would have found that even the old woman's curse did not prevent him from knowing what it was to feel warm; and once recognizing this, he would have been able, perhaps, to rise above the superstitious fears to which in reality the sensation of cold was The commonplace curse of an old woman whom even the least censorious can hardly regard as altogether worthy of absolute veneration, and who had probably exchanged some rather coarse abuse with Gill in the preceding "altercation," is rather amusingly changed by Wordsworth into a solemn appeal to heaven by a much injured victim (after all it must be remembered that Gill had not hurt the old woman, and that a farmer has some right to complain when his hedges are broken and his sticks removed):

"Then Goody, who had nothing said," (having, it should seem, very little to say-)

"Her bundle from her lap let fall;

And kneeling on the sticks, she prayed
To God, who is the judge of all,
She prayed, her withered hand uprearing,
While Harry held her by the arm-
'God! that art never out of hearing,
Oh may he never more be warm!'
The cold, cold moon above her head,
Thus on her knees did Goody pray;
Young Harry heard what she had said,
And icy cold he turned away."

Probably we may refer the effect of her
malediction rather to her appearance-
as described by Dr. Darwin,
Ian old
woman like a witch in a play"—than to
the solemnity of her prayer. He be-
lieved, in his sudden fear, that she was
a witch; his imagination attributed to the
witch's curse the cold which naturally
enough resulted from his long watch on
a bitter cold night; and his fears thus
seemingly confirmed so influenced his
imagination thereafter, that he expe-
rienced the constant sensation of cold
described by Darwin. That the actual
temperature of his body was also affect-
ed may well be believed. For it is well
known that persons whose minds are
affected undergo a loss of temperature.
"In mélancolie avec stupeur," says Dr.
Ertzbischoff, the temperature is al-
ways below the normal amount." But
it is certain the actual loss of heat can-
not have been even nearly so great as

use blinking the fact. The experience of everybody who knows the two countries will agree upon this. An English man who is personally not unpresentable, and who goes to the United States provided with passable credentials, will be handed on from house to house and received everywhere and at once on a footing of cordial intimacy. How far this is from being the case with American travellers in England it is needless to say. An Englishman who has enjoyed American hospitality can hardly reflect on the matter without feeling a certain compunction. But, sentiment But, sentiment apart, it is worth while asking what are the reasons for English reserve in this respect, and if, or how far, this reserve is justified.

Mr. Hazeltine is of opinion that the snubbing which his country-women in the International Episode got from the English ladies of rank was no more than might have been fairly expected. The same snubbing, he implies, would have been administered to English ladies of all but the highest class who aspired to ally themselves with a future Duke. We may remark parenthetically that Mr. Hazeltine seems imperfectly acquainted with the divisions and gradations of English society. It is incorrect to talk, as he does, of wealthy and cultivated people engaged in the learned professions or in commerce as "the lower middle class." Nor is it true that there is in England any hard and fast line which separates such people from the nobility. Nor, further, is it true that the American ladies in question would have got in all likelihood a much franker welcome from English people a few pegs lower down, if one must use the phrase, on the social ladder. All that was known of them was that they were good-looking, well-mannered, and welldressed, and that the young gentleman who was in love with one of them had passed some time very pleasantly at their house. A mother need not be a duchess to be shy of lavishing invitations on strangers under such circumstances. And if the American young lady had said Let us go, for suppose we go," or "a quarter to four," instead of a quarter before four," Mr. Hazeltine may be quite sure that neither a duchess nor anybody else would have found any

64

66

We appreci

But

thing amiss in her speech. ate the candor which can see that there are two sides to an affair of this kind, and we agree with Mr. Hazeltine that in this instance the American ladies had no right to feel themselves aggrieved. we do not agree with him in the explanation he gives. Had both the ladies, instead of one only, been married, or had the young man himself been married, they would probably have met with a very different welcome. But when a young man, himself a great prize, in the matrimonial market, falls in love with a girl who is not a great prize, who does not belong to his order or his set, and about whose family and early associations and position generally very little is known, it is not to be wondered at that the girl, whether American or not, should get the cold shoulder from his female relations. The chances are that, if it had not been for the imminent peril of matrimony which any advances on the part of the English ladies would have involved, they would have been only too happy to help the visitors to a social success, and Mrs. Westgate and Miss Alden would have had the honor, before the season was over, of dancing with royalty itself.

Still it remains true that Americans in general find it hard to acclimatize themselves in England. They land at Liverpool, spend three days at the Lakes, where it usually rains, stop half a day at Chester, and perhaps a day at Kenilworth, on their way to London, visit the Tower, Westminster Abbey, the Zoological Gardens, and the Houses of Parliament, and then take the train to Paris. It is clear that they do not find the time pass pleasantly in England. They are not in a hurry to leave Paris or Florence when once they arrive there. They linger on after all the sights have been seen, because the life there suits them. They make good resolutions to see England well on their way home, which lasts until they get as far as Paris on the return journey. But there the fascinations of the theatres, the dilatoriness of Worth, the adieux to friends, the thousand excuses which people make for not doing what they do not like, detain them till three days before the steamer sails from Liverpool. This is all natural enough. The climate of England is