PAULINE E. HOPKINS.
Copyright, 1902, by Pauline E. Hopkins.
[Pg 29]
The recitations were over for the day. It was the first week inNovember and it had rained about every day the entire week; nowfreezing temperature added to the discomforture of the dismal season.The lingering equinoctial whirled the last clinging yellow leavesfrom the trees on the campus and strewed them over the desertedpaths, while from the leaden sky fluttering snow-white flakes gave anunexpected touch of winter to the scene.
The east wind for which Boston and vicinity is celebrated, drove thesleet against the window panes of the room in which Reuel Briggs satamong his books and the apparatus for experiments. The room servedfor both living and sleeping. Briggs could have told you that thebareness[Pg 30] and desolateness of the apartment were like his life, buthe was a reticent man who knew how to suffer in silence. The drearywet afternoon, the cheerless walk over West Boston bridge through thesoaking streets had but served to emphasize the loneliness of hisposition, and morbid thoughts had haunted him all day: To what use allthis persistent hard work for a place in the world—clothes, food, aroof? Is suicide wrong? he asked himself with tormenting persistency.From out the storm, voices and hands seemed beckoning him all day tocut the Gordian knot and solve the riddle of whence and whither for alltime.
His place in the world would soon be filled; no vacuum remained empty;the eternal movement of all things onward closed up the gaps, and thewail of the newly-born augmented the great army of mortals pressingthe vitals of mother Earth with hurrying tread. So he had tormentedhimself for months, but the courage was yet wanting for strength torend the veil. It had grown dark early. Reuel had not stirred from hisroom since coming from the hospital—had not eaten nor drank, and wasin full possession of the solitude he craved. It was now five o’clock.He sat sideways by the bare table, one leg crossed over the other. Hisfingers kept the book open at the page where he was reading, but hisattention wandered beyond the leaden sky, the dripping panes, and thesounds of the driving storm outside.
He was thinking deeply of the words he had just read, and which thedarkness had shut from his gaze. The book was called “The UnclassifiedResiduum,” just published and eagerly sought by students of mysticism,and dealing with the great field of new discoveries in psychology.Briggs was a close student of what might be termed “absurdities” ofsupernatural phenomena or mysticism, best known to the every-dayworld as “effects of the imagination,” a phrase of mere dismissal, andwhich it is impossible to make precise; the book suited the man’s mood.These were the words of haunting significance:
“All the while, however, the phenomena are there, lying broadcast overthe surface of history. No matter where you open its pages, you findthings recorded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacalpossessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healingand productions of disease, and occult powers possessed by peculiarindividuals over persons and things in their neighborhood.
“The mind-curers and Christian scientists, who are beginning to lift uptheir heads in our communities, unquestionably get remarkable resultsin certain cases. The ordinary medical man dismisses them from hisattention with the cut-and-dried remark that the