"Have you heard that among certain tribes of the North-American Indians are men who possess an art which enables them to endure torture and actual death without apparent suffering or even consciousness? I once chanced to fall in with one of these tribes, then living in Louisiana, now removed to the far West, and was permitted to witness some fantastic rites, half warlike, half religious, in which, however, there was nothing noticeable except this trance-like condition, which some of the warriors seemed to command at pleasure, manifested by a tense rigidity of the features and muscles, and a mental exaltation which proved to be both clairvoyant and clairoyant: a state analogous to that of hypnotism, or the artificial sleep produced by gazing fixedly on a near, bright object, and differing only in degree from the nervous or imaginative control which has been known to arrest and cure disease, which chained St. Simeon Stylites to his pillar, and sustains the Hindoo fakirs in their apparently superhuman vigils. These children of Nature had probed with direct simplicity some of the deep secrets which men of science often fail to discern through tortuous devices. I was assured that this trance was merely the result of a concentrative energy of the will, which riveted the faculties upon a single purpose or idea, and held every nerve and sense in absolute abeyance. We are so little accustomed to test the potency of the will out of the ordinary plane of its operation, that we have little conception how mighty a lever it may be made, or to what new exercise it may be directed; and yet we are all conscious of periods in our lives when, like a vast rock in ocean, it has suddenly loomed up firm and defiant amid our petty purposes and fretful indecisions, waxing grander and stronger under opposition, a something apart from, yet a conscious portion of ourselves,--a master, though a slave,--another revelation of the divinity within.
"I will confess that curiosity led me long ago to slight experiments in the direction in which you say the diabolic lies, but my mind was never concentrated on any one idea of sufficient interest to command success, until, in some periods of mingled peril and excitement, the memory of Blanche, and the conscious, even startling nearness of that sweet presence, have lent to my will unwonted energy and inspiration.