Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/47

Rh "We both had something to forgive. Listen, and I will tell you: My name is Avery; and thirty-three years ago, your father and I lived in the same little town in Rhode Island. He was a cotton manufacturer, I a poor clergyman. Among my parish was was a young woman, named Cornell, who worked in your father's mill, and attended my meeting. She was one day found suspended to the limb of a tree, in a solitary place near the village. She had no doubt committed suicide, to avoid the exposure of her shame; but there were some indications of foul play, and it was by many supposed that she had been first strangled and then hanged to give her death the appearance of suicide. I had been intimate with her family, and the gossips connected my name with hers, but falsely. Your father heard of this, and it excited his suspicions. He had me arrested on the charge of murder, and used all his influence—I thought at the time unfairly—to secure my conviction. After a long and agonizing trial and imprisonment, I was acquitted; and then, before I left the court room, I went to your father, and told him I would follow him through the world; that I would not rest, day or night, till I had visited upon him some of the misery he had heaped upon me. These threats were heard by others, and they excited public indignation against me to so high a pitch, that I could not stay to execute my purpose.

I went away, but I came again, intending to burn his mill, and perhaps to do a murder. He was just dead, so he had escaped me. I had been pronounced innocent, but I was a branded man. Everywhere I went men shunned me, and, after a few years of wretched life, I came to this world of retribution. Here, my first inquiry was for your father, but he had gone on, again beyond my reach, and then I determined to pay my debt to his son. I came back to earth seeking you, but you had left your native village, and gone I could not learn where. For more than twenty years I sought you—it was looking for a drop in a great ocean—but I found you at last. I could not reach you except through a medium. I lured you to one, and you know the rest—my iniquity and your trial. Do you now forgive me?"

"I do," I answered, "and I am sorry that twenty years of your life have been so wasted. But, 'there is a future for all men who have the virtue to repent, and the energy to atone.' Let me hope that is as true in your world as it is in ours."

"It is, thank God, it is."

I am aware that the tale told by this unhappy man may seem to many like the wildest fiction. I do not know but it is; yet I can assure the reader that many a wilder tale has been heard by thousands who have undertaken a thorough investigation of Spiritualism. If its phenomena be true, it holds within its bosom all the secrets of human life and history; and may not those secrets now