Page:Heroines of freethought (IA cu31924031228699).pdf/165

Rh and imaginative faculties, finding in them her chief source of recreation and enjoyment. Such an unusual set of conditions must yield, of course, some results of unusual experience. She says, speaking of this phase of her life:

“It seems to me that for want of the ‘distraction’ commonly enjoyed through the play of the senses, there is too little relief to the action of the busiest parts of the brain,”

It was, perhaps, owing to the lack of this “distraction” made by the full exercise of all the senses that many of her strange experiences in mesmerism and clairvoyance are due. That even as a child her state of mind was in some respects a strangely peculiar and abnormal one is evidenced by several circumstances related by herself, among them the following:

“Let me tell you a curious thing which happened twice to me—the being unable by any effort to see a conspicuous object directly before my eyes—I suppose because I