1840-42. TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. 257 



idea of a God, and the phrenologists were able to show that 

 their brains had no cranny or crevice in which such a thought 

 could by possibility lurk. Very good ! and yet a recent traveller 

 who has visited the tribes in the interior where little commu- 

 nication with Europeans has left them in their unsophisticated 

 state finds that these poor brainless people have minds subtle 

 enough to conceive the idea of a future state, and do actually 

 believe in a metempsychosis of souls. It appears that the first 

 white strangers were supposed to be transmigrated beings of 

 their own tribe, come back in a new incarnation. 



" A most affecting proof of the depth and reality of the belief 

 is afforded by the traveller, whose name I have forgotten. 

 Wandering one day into the village of a secluded tribe, an old 

 woman walked up and looked at him with evident signs of 

 agitation and pleasure. After gazing a while anxiously, she 

 said, ' Yes, it is he/ and clasped the stranger in her arms. He 

 learned, by and by, that she looked on him as the fleshly ghost 

 or avatar of a lost son, and he was introduced to sisters, uncles, 

 and others, as their long lost relation, returned to dwell with 

 them." 



TO HlS SlSTER-IN-LAW. 



" May 28, 1841. 



" MY DEAR MAGGIE, I have not been delighted with any- 

 thing this long, long time so much as with your kind, sisterly 

 letter. I let my class wait till I had read it ; and over and over 

 again, on the day of its reception, I hauled it out of its cover 

 and took another spell at it. As to its various topics I shall do 

 my best to profit by them, though I cannot say that I un- 

 derstand the interest of the Exeter Hall meetings. Society 

 meetings, whether to convert Jews or to supply chimney-sweeps 

 with weekly rations of soap and soda, have long been to me 

 utter abominations. Yet, after all, it may be that the yearly 

 May explosion of all the froth-bubbles that have been sim- 

 mering and fermenting themselves into existence, during the 

 preceding twelve months, keeps ' the brains of men clear for the 

 rest of the year.' I don't like the trumpet-sounding spirit of 



R 



