 gubernatorial mansion. The rumor spread thence into a wider
circle. Those who knew old Moodie - as he was now called - used often to jeer
him, at the very street-corners, about his daughter's gift of second-sight and
prophecy. It was a period when science (though mostly through its empirical
professors) was bringing forward, anew, a hoard of facts and imperfect theories,
that had partially won credence, in elder times, but which modern scepticism had
swept away as rubbish. These things were now tossed up again, out of the surging
ocean of human thought and experience. The story of Priscilla's preternatural
manifestations, therefore, attracted a kind of notice of which it would have
been deemed wholly unworthy, a few years earlier. One day, a gentleman ascended
the creaking staircase, and inquired which was old Moodie's chamber-door. And,
several times, he came again. He was a marvellously handsome man, still
youthful, too, and fashionably dressed. Except that Priscilla, in those days,
had no beauty, and, in the languor of her existence, had not yet blossomed into
womanhood, there would have been rich food for scandal in these visits; for the
girl was unquestionably their sole object, although her father was supposed
always to be present. But, it must likewise be added, there was something about
Priscilla that calumny could not meddle with; and thus far was she privileged,
either by the preponderance of what was spiritual, or the thin and watery blood
that left her cheek so pallid.
    Yet, if the busy tongues of the neighborhood spared Priscilla, in one way,
they made themselves amends by renewed and wilder babble, on another score. They
averred that the strange gentleman was a wizard, and that he had taken advantage
of Priscilla's lack of earthly substance to subject her to himself, as his
familiar spirit, through whose medium he gained cognizance of whatever happened,
in regions near or remote. The boundaries of his power were defined by the verge
of the pit of Tartarus, on the one hand, and the third sphere of the celestial
world, on the other. Again, they declared their suspicion that the wizard, with
all his show of manly beauty, was really an aged and wizened figure, or else
that his semblance of a human body was only a necromantic, or perhaps a
mechanical contrivance, in which a demon walked about. In proof of it, however,
they could merely instance a gold band around his upper teeth, which had once
been visible to several old women,
