DAYS, weeks, months, seasons, years, pass quickly on this planet,—and doubtless also on the others. The Earth has already run its yearly course around the Sun twenty times since destiny so tragically closed the book that my young friends had been reading for less than a year. Their happiness was short-lived; their morning faded away like the dawn. I had forgotten,1 or at least lost sight of them, when quite recently, at a hypnotic sÉance in Nancy, where I had stopped for a few days on my way to the Vosges, I was induced to question a "subject" by whose assistance the experimental savants of the AcadÉmie Stanislas had obtained some of those really startling results with which the scientific Press has surprised us for a few years past. I do not remember how, but it happened that my conversation with him turned on the planet Mars. After describing to me a country situated on the shores of a sea known to astronomers under the name of Kepler's Ocean, and a solitary island lying in the bosom of this sea; after telling me about the picturesque landscapes and reddish vegetation which adorned the shores, the wave-washed cliffs, and the sandy beaches where the billows break and die away,—the subject, who was very sensitive, suddenly grew pale, and raised his hand to his head; his eyes closed, his eyebrows contracted; he seemed desirous of grasping some fugitive idea which obstinately eluded him. "See!" said Dr. B., standing before him with irresistible command; "see! I wish it."

"You have friends there," he said to me.

"I am not surprised at that," I said, laughing; "I have done enough to deserve them."

"Two friends," he went on, "who are talking about you now, this very minute."

"Ah, ha! Persons who know me?"

"Yes."

"How is that?"

"They have known you here."

"Here?"

"Here,—on the earth!"

"How long ago was it?"

"I do not know."

"Have they lived on Mars long?"

"I do not know."

"Are they young?"

"Yes; they are lovers, who adore each other." Then the loved image of my lamented friends rose distinctly in my mind; but I had no sooner seen them than the subject exclaimed,—

"Yes! it is they!"

"How do you know?"

"I see,—they are the same souls, same colors."

"What do you mean by the 'same colors'?"

"Yes, the souls are suffused with light."

A few instants afterwards he added, "And yet there is a difference."

Then he was silent, his forehead frowning in his effort to find out. But his face regained all its calmness and serenity as he added,—

"He has become she, the woman; she is now the man,—and they love each other more than ever."

As if he did not quite understand what he had said himself, he seemed to be seeking for some explanation,—made painful efforts, judging from the contraction of the muscles in his face, and fell into a sort of cataleptic fit, from which Dr. B. speedily relieved him; but the lucid interval had fled, not to return.

In ending, I leave this last fact with the reader just as it happened, without comment. Had the subject, according to the hypothesis now admitted by many hypnotists, been under the influence of my own thought when the professor ordered him to answer me? Or, being independent, had he really "freed" himself, and had he seen beyond our sphere? I cannot undertake to decide. Perhaps it will appear in the course of this story.

And yet I will acknowledge in all sincerity that the resurrection of my friend and his adored companion on the world of Mars,—a neighboring abode to ours, and so remarkably like this one we inhabit, only older, doubtless more advanced on the road of progress,—may appear to a thinker's eyes the logical and natural continuation of their earthly existence, so quickly broken off.

Doubtless Spero was right in declaring that matter is not what it seems to be, and that appearances are deceitful; that the real is the invisible; that animate force is indestructible; that in the absolute, the infinitely great is identical with the infinitely small; that celestial space is not impassable; and that souls are the seeds of planetary humanities. Who knows but that the philosophy of dynamism may one day reveal the religion of the future to the apostles of astronomy? Does not Urania bear the torch without which every problem is insoluble, without which all Nature would remain to us in impenetrable obscurity? Heaven must explain the earth, the infinite must explain the soul and its immaterial faculties.

The unknown of to-day is the truth of to-morrow.

The following pages will perhaps enable us to form something of an idea of the mysterious link which binds the transitory to the eternal, the visible to the invisible, earth to heaven.