Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/200

 that my meaning only will be given to the terms used, we will now proceed. I became a rapt observer, not of the man in the study, as a person, but as a rare mechanism. The clothes he wore, emitted a dull, faint, leaden-hued cloud, perfectly transparent, and extending about three inches from their surface in all directions. His body was apparently composed of orange-colored flame, and its emanations reached to the distance of fifteen feet on all sides; it penetrated the wood-work, walls, chairs, tables,—all with which it came in contact; and I noticed two facts: first, that its form was an oblate spheroid, and second, that a portion of it adhered to whatever he touched. Thus it is true that a man leaves a portion of himself wherever he may chance to go: this explains why a dog is enabled to trace his master through the streets of a crowded city. * * * * * When the man rose to silence the noise of his children, I discerned the form of this sphere, in the centre of a similar one of which every created being stands. Its poles were the head and feet, and its equator, whose bulge exceeded the polar dimensions about one-fortieth, was directly on the plane of the abdominal centre. This sphere penetrated that of the clothes; and, although it was so marvelously fine, still it, like its exemplar—a large soap-bubble—appeared to be particled, or heterogeneous. Within the physical body of the man there was a second,—itself constituting another human form, like the vase within a vase. The substance of this last was beautiful and pearly; its mass was apparently in perfect coalescence,—indivisible, atomless and unparticled. This was the man's true shell—his house, his home,—the outbirth of, but not the man himself.