"The more I see of spiritualists and the less I see of phenomena," he said, "the more discontented with it I am.

It is nothing but a fashionable drawing-room game." He dwelt a good deal on the subjective interpretation of nature.

One evening--we had been listening to the owls crying--he said, abstractedly: "We put strange meanings enough, God knows, into faces that never owned them.

We hear dreary hopelessness in the moaning of the wind; wild sorrow in the tossing of the trees; and read into the work-a-day cries of birds, content, humour, melancholy, and a thousand other unknown feelings." He spoke much about the country and its effect on people.

"Wisdom," he said, "is generally reared among fields and woody places, and when she is nearly grown she wanders into the cities of men, to see if she can not rule there; and then the test really comes.