Eternal Progress — Magnetic séAnce.

DAYS, weeks, months, seasons, years pass swiftly on this planet, and doubtless also on the others. More than twenty times already had the Earth made its annual revolution around the sun, since the day when Fate so tragically closed the book which my young friends had been reading for not quite a year; their happiness had passed swiftly, their day had ended in its dawn. I had, if not forgotten, [*] at least ceased to think of them, when, quite recently, in a hypnotic séance, at Nancy, where I had stopped for a few days on my way to the Vosges, I was led to question a “subject” by whose aid in their investigations, the savants of the Stanislas Academy had obtained some of those truly marvelous results with which the scientific press has been astonishing us for some years past. I do not remember how it happened that he and I entered into a conversation concerning the planet Mars.

After describing a country situated on the shores of a sea known to astronomers by the name of the Sea of Sathir, and a solitary island which rises from the bosom of this sea, after describing the picturesque scenery and the reddish vegetation of these shores, the cliffs against which the waves dash ceaselessly, the sandy beach, on which they die away, the subject, who was a sensitive of extraordinary power, suddenly grew pale, and carried his hand to his forehead. His eyes closed, he contracted his brows, he seemed trying to grasp an idea that fled from him. “See!” cried Doctor B—— raising his hand with a gesture of command —

“See! I will it.”

“You have friends there,” the sensitive said to me.

“That does not surprise me greatly,” I answered. “I have done a good deal for the inhabitants of that planet.”

“Two friends,” he added, “who are talking of you now.”

“Oh, persons who are acquainted with me?”

“Yes.”

“How can that be?”

“They have known you here.”

“Here?”

“Here on the Earth.”

“Ah! And is it long since?”

“I do not know.”

“Are they young?”

“Yes, they are two lovers who adore each other.”

Then the charming images of my regretted friends were brought vividly before my mind. But I had no sooner thought of them than the sensitive cried, in a more assured voice:

“It is they!”

“How do you know?”

“I see it. They are the same souls; they ............