Putting on his spectacles, the learned professor looked hard at the table, and gently scraped with his penknife into the holes, but said nothing.

‘Is it not an unusual thing, this?’ anxiously asked Anna.

‘Very unusual, miss.’

At which Julia and Anna exchanged significant glances.

‘But is it not wonderful, very wonderful?’ demanded Julia.

‘Very wonderful, miss.’

My daughters exchanged still more significant glances, and Julia, emboldened, again spoke.

‘And must you not admit, sir, that it is the work of—of—sp—?’

‘Spirits? No,’ was the crusty rejoinder.

‘My daughters,’ said I, mildly, ‘you should remember that this is not Madame Pazzi, the conjuress, you put your questions to, but the eminent naturalist, Professor Johnson. And now, professor,’ I added, ‘be pleased to explain. Enlighten our ignorance.’

Without repeating all that the learned gentleman said for, indeed, though lucid, he was a little prosy—let the following summary of his explication suffice.

The incident was not wholly without example. The wood of the table was apple-tree, a sort of tree much fancied by various insects. The bugs had come from eggs laid inside the bark of the living tree in the orchard. By careful examination of the position of the hole from which the last bug had emerged, in relation to the cortical layers of the slab, and then allowing for the inch and a half along the grain, ere the bug had eaten its way entirely out, and then computing the whole number of cortical layers in the slab, with a reasonable conjecture for the number cut off from the outside, it appeared that the egg must have been laid in the tree some ninety years, more or less, before the tree could have been felled. But between the felling of the tree and the present time, how long might that be? It was a very old-fashioned table. Allow eighty years for the age of the table, which would make one hundred and seventy years that the bug had lain in the egg. Such, at least, was Professor Johnson’s computation.

‘Now, Julia,’ said I, ‘after that scientific statement of the case (though, I confess, I don’t exactly understand it), where are your spirits? It is very wonderful as it is, but where are your spirits?’

‘Where, indeed?’ said my wife.

‘Why, now, she did not really associate this purely natural phenomenon with any crude spiritual hypothesis did she?’ observed the learned professor, with a slight sneer.

‘Say what you will,’ said Julia, holding up, in the covered tumbler, the glorious, lustrous, flashing live opal, ‘say what you will, if this beauteous creature be not a spirit, it yet teaches a spiritual lesson. For if, after one hundred and seventy years’ entombment, a mere insect comes forth at last into light, itself an effulgence, shall there be no glorified resurrection for the spirit of man? Spirits! spirits!’ she exclaimed, with rapture, ‘I still believe in spirits, only now I believe in them with delight, when before I but thought of them with terror.’

The mysterious insect did not long enjoy its radiant life; it expired the next day. But my girls have preserved it. Embalmed in a silver vinaigrette, it lies on the little apple-tree table in the pier of the cedar-parlour.