( 91 )
told it — if all the classes of her people had been, like your's, harmoniously blended, and she had been purified as you progressively became purer, she could no more have expired in the convulsions you are describing than a patient who with us has been vaccinated can be stretch- ed out by it a loathsome carcass covered with putrid blotches, spreading pestilence and terror till the earth swallows him up. — Go on, then, to explain the mystery of this conduct. — You had been placed by Providence, as you set out by telling me, as its instrument and agent in your world, and it appears to me that you slept upon your post when you ought to have been most upon the alert in the fulfilment of your duty." " I feel the force of all you say," an- swered Morven, " but I hasten to pass by this painful subject. — Individual opinions ought to be held as nothing against public counsels, though it is our best privilege to express them, and I should not have insisted upon them at so remote a period, but that they usefully con- nect themselves with the events which will ¬soon ¬
