I cannot say why this strange unwholesome legend took such hold of me. Perhaps because it was unwholesome. I could not shake myself clear from it; and I had a haunting kind of prevision that more hung on it than its own superstitious fancy. I had just heard, too, of Joanna Southcote; and altogether my mind was, as it were, fascinated by this subject of virgin births–their possibility now as their certainty in times past–and by the whole range, indeed, of divine interposition in the works and ways of man.