Page:Edgar Huntly, or The Sleep Walker.djvu/228

 you, and convince me that I am not dreaming, or delirious!"

"Can you need any proof," I answered, "that it is Edgar Huntly—your pupil, your child—that speaks to you?"

He now withdrew his eyes from me, and fixed them on the floor. After a pause, he resumed, in emphatic accents—"Well, I have lived to this age in unbelief! To credit or trust in miraculous agency, was foreign to my nature; but now I am no longer sceptical: call me to any bar, and exact from me an oath that you have twice been dead, and twice recalled to life—that you move about invisibly, and change your place by the force, not of muscles, but of thought, and I will give it.

"How came you hither? Did you penetrate the wall? Did you rise through the floor?

"Yet surely 'tis an error; you cannot be he whom twenty witnesses affirmed to have beheld a lifeless and mangled corpse upon the ground—whom my own eyes saw in that condition!

"In seeking the spot once more to provide you a grave, you had vanished: again I met you; you plunged into a rapid stream from a height from which it was impossible to fall and to live; yet, as if to set the limits of nature at defiance, to sport with human penetration, you rose upon the surface—you floated—you swam. Thirty bullets were aimed at your head by marksmen celebrated for the exactness of their sight: I myself was of the number, and I never missed what I desired to hit.

"My predictions were confirmed by the event: you ceased to struggle—you sunk, to rise no more; and yet, after these accumulated deaths, you light upon this floor, so far distant from the scene of your catastrophe, over spaces only to be passed, in so short a time as has since elapsed, by those who have wings.

"My eyes, my ears, bear testimony to your existence now, as they formerly convinced me of your death. What am I to think? What proofs am I to credit?"

There he stopped.

Every accent of this speech added to the confusion of