Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/408

 Strodtmann had returned to me I gave him the two envelopes, without informing him of their contents, and instructed him to place them in the hands of the clairvoyante, with the request that she give a description of the appearance, the character, the past career and the temporary sojourn of the person from whom the objects concealed in the envelopes had come. Then I left for London.

A few days later I received a letter from Strodtmann, in which he narrated the results of the séance, as follows: The clairvoyante took one of my envelopes in her hand and said this contained the hair of a young man who looked thus and so. She then described my appearance in the most accurate way, and added that this young man had won notoriety by his connection with a bold enterprise, and that at the present time he was on the other side of a deep water, in a large city and in the circle of a happy family. Then she gave a description of my character, my inclinations and my mental faculties, which, as I saw them in black and white, surprised me greatly. Not only did I recognize myself in the main features of this description, but I found in it also certain statements which seemed to give me new disclosures about myself. It happens sometimes when we look into our own souls that in our impulses, in our feelings, in our ways of thinking, we find something contradictory, something enigmatical, which the most conscientious self-examination does not always suffice to make clear. And now there flashed from the utterances of this clairvoyante gleams of light which solved for me many of those contradictions and riddles. I received, so to speak, a revelation about my own inner self, a psychological analysis which I had to recognize as just as soon as I perceived it.

What the clairvoyante said about the other envelope, which contained Klapka's writing, was hardly less astonishing. She