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SPIRIT LIFE

OR, DO WE DIE ?

BY WILLIAM DUNSEATH EATON

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Founder and first Editor of The Chicago Herald. Author of "The True Flame," "The White Crows," "Iskander," "The Parson o' Dumford," "Joshua Whitcomb," "All the Kage," A History of the World War, and other books and plays.

CHICAGO

SWToN^VanVLIET®.

PUBLISHERS

*&v

Copyright 1920 by

STANTON & VAN VLIET CO.

Entered Stationers Hall, London, England

NOV 1 1 1920 ©CLA605127

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TO

HERBERT VANDERHOOF

Editor op Canada Monthly Magazine

Excellent Journalist and Faithful Friend

"Alas for him who never sees

The stars shine through his cypress trees !

Who hopeless lays his dead away,

Nor looks to see the breaking day

Across the mournful marble play;

Who hath not learned, in hours of faith,

The truth to fleshly sense unknown,

That life is ever lord of death

And love can never lose its own/'

— WHxixm.

CONTENTS

Page

Reading the Future

A Prophecy of Pioneering 12

I Discover the Linotype 14

Affection that Bridged the Grave 19

The Chicago Herald 30

A Foregleam of Drama 36

The Spirit of the North 42

A Pragmatical Ghost . . 47

"From the Vasty Deep" 48

"The Everlasting Now" . . 50

The Unseen Realities 54

Sir Oliver Lodge on Etheral Bodies The Vision of Count Tolstoi 70

Apparitions

The Ghost of Philip's Mother 76

At the Moment of Death ........ 80

Philip's Daughter 82

The Man Who Had No Use for Ghosts 82

A Ghost that Protested 84

The Ghost of Mrs. Conwell 86

The Spectre Monk 90

The Indignant Ghost 92

A Ghost of Tragic Memory 94

The Banshee of the O'Neills 97

Lady Fanshawe Sees a Banshee 97

The Beresford Ghost 98

"The Veil of Disembodied Spirits" 107

A Natural Body and a Spiritual Body 112

The Persistence of Spirits . . 114

The Famous Wynyard Ghost 118

The Ghost that Killed Marshal Bliicher . . . . .125

The Ghosts of Holy Writ 132

Lying Spirits 134

The Substance of Apparitions 136

Denman Thompson and the Live-Man Ghost . . . 139

Dark Ways of the Cabinet Spook 142

"Visions of the Night" '. . 145

Contents

Page

Why Ghosts Prefer the Dark 145

The Trouble with the Whole Thing 146

The Great Rhapsody 146

Weighing a Soul

Where Does the Lost Substance Go? 157

Visible Doubles of Living Persons 161

What Happens When You Die . . . . . . .166

Persistent Personal Character 167

Second-Hand Ghosts 169

No Summons Runs in Shadowland 170

Between Two Worlds

One Who Died and Came Back . . 173

Ouija

Manifestations

Telepathy

Mind Reading by Agreement 203

The Capture of New York 204

The Sad Case of Bishop 205

Muscle Readers 206

Do Your Own Mind Reading ....... 207

What Is Telepathy? " ... . .208

Telepathy and Hypnosis 214

Materialization Seances A Materialized Body 220

Conan Doyle and the Katy King Case Conan Doyle's Letter of Explanation 226

Higher Attributes of Lower Animals

The Dog that Could Live No Longer 234

The Cat that Persuaded Itself 236

Hypnotism

The Doings of William Kennedy 242

The Orthodox Party and the "Baby" 243

The Expert from the Audience 243

Kennedy and the Great Prince 245

The Hypnotic Process 246

The Little Golden Snakes . . . . . . . . 262

The Sum of the Matter

PREFACE

Birth and death are incidents in life. The human body is assembled at one and dissolved at the other, but its temporary and more or less intelligent inhabitant goes uninterrupted on his educative way.

This book is not concerned with the state preceding birth, but only with that which fol- lows bodily death, and with evidences of that state offered by people who have entered it.

The scope allowed is wide enough to include intelligence as a superphysical quantity in what we call the lower orders of life, and the presence of influences that are neither physical nor spiritual in the ordinary sense of those terms, but properties of a domain that lies be- tween the two.

There is at this time a real spiritual awaken- ing very like that of the first Christian century. Early Christianity was affirmed by phenomena precisely similar to those of the present, and like them, arising from uncarnate springs of action. Religious beliefs that originated in the middle ages have been shaken by a war in which millions of human lives were snapped out. The air was filled with souls violently pro- jected from their habitations, the nations were

full of people suddenly bereft of their dearest. Stress of affection from those who had gone met stress of longing from those who remained. Across this vast bridge of sighs, disregarding old inhibitions, incarnate and excarnate reached and intermingled. The contact re- mains, though its impulse has lost poignancy. The margins of life have overlapped until almost we have come to realize Rupert Brooke's vision of a time when we shall

"Think each in each, immediately wise;

Learn all we lacked before; hear, know and say What this tumultuous body now denies;

And feel, who have laid our groping hands away, And see, no longer blinded by our eyes."

That awakening suggested this book, but I have refrained from localizing the subject in the time-zone of war. I have taken and treated it at large, as befits a matter that is and always has been concurrent with human living.

The book offers no argument for spiritual- ism as such, but confines itself to narratives of fact, with such explanation of things that seem extraordinary as may bring them within every- day understanding. W. D. Eaton.

The Press Club, Chicago, 1920.

"READING THE FUTURE"

MY FIRST look-in on divination came when I was eighteen years young, and correspondingly cocksure of everything. A New York Herald man of my acquaintance drifted along one day, uneasily drunk and anxious to get over it. His name was George Brown, and his manner of life was iridescent. His father, a merchant in a nearby country town, had to come forward several times and pay things up for him, on a rather large scale, relatively speaking. George's idea that day was to take a long walk in shady streets. He thought I was the boy to see that he took it. I concurred in this, and we walked.

In a street noticeably quiet for even that quiet city, a sign on a house said a fortune teller lived inside. George was piped up to just about that kind of thing, and we must go in, and did. I had the creeps, I remember, and would have liked to escape, but the sybil was there and waiting, and I could get through with it more gracefully than I could get out.

10 Spirit Life

I know now she was a crystal gazer. It was all new to me then.

She was an old woman, sad eyed, and snuf- fling as with impending tears. A piece of bright glass lay in her lap, and after a mourn- ful survey of us, she sighed and looked at it. A few moments of silence, and then she began on George, and scared him sober with a Cas- sandra warning — woe, woe! His own career was to be brilliant but short, yet long enough to let him kill his father. Not with his hands, but by his acts, for he would ruin that good old man, and through heartbreak working on a frame already enfeebled, bring him to the grave, where the mother soon would follow. And for his own unhappy part, the cup would get him before his powers would have time to ripen. George shrank in his chair, chalk white, but he said nothing.

Then she attended to my case, and gave me a life reading, sketchy, but clear in the high spots, up to my eighty-fourth year — at which time I would (as she delicately put it) cease to take interest in the affairs of this world.

In justice to that old girl, I must say she had it about right so far as my traipsing has

Spirit Life 11

carried me, and fixed me out with a comforta- ble ending, surrounded by friends; which festive feature I mean, if possible, to elude, for I can't understand why anyone should want anyone else on the premises when he dies. It is better done solus, unless one be fortunate enough to die in battle.

However, being eighteen and infallible, the whole thing seemed too trivial to engage the serious attention of a first class intellect (my own), and I dismissed it. But George's father died within two years, empoverished and heartbroken even as said, and his mother lingered but a little while after. George's own life went down in gloom before he had reached thirty; and in the latter days of it he ate ashes like bread, and mingled his drink with weeping.

For a long time — several years — that epi- sode stood alone. Then it fell to me as a news- paper man to do a turn of investigating for the explosion of a fraud, which was all in the day's work, but a few things came up that set me investigating on my own account. Some- times it would be with friends, sometimes alone, but I pursued the subject until I had seen it in all its aspects. I have my own opinion of it.

12 Spirit Life

I saw a great many practitioners, most of them shocking creatures, many of them good though unconscious comedy characters; and here and there a few who were capable and helpful. The best of these last were Mrs. Hesse, of New York, Mrs. Simpson, who lived in Sheldon street near Union Park, Chicago, Mrs. Mary E. Weaver, who lives in West Adams street, and Doctor Corliss, of Brooklyn.

Mrs. Simpson was a slight, nervous woman, a Louisiana creole by birth, the mother of a family, and held in high esteem by her neigh- bors, as I learned by inquiry. My old friend Mr. McVicker had heard of her, and asked me to go over and find out what she could do. I knew no more about her than he told me, and that was only her name and address.

The sitting was interesting, but the main part of it seemed to me at the time too remote from probability to be worth considering. This is that part:

A PROPHECY OF PIONEERING

She told me that in about three years I would come to a turning point in my career. I would find myself standing on the side of a mountain, looking over a rolling prairie, white

Spirit Life 13

with snow in the morning sunlight ; that before sunset that day I would come upon an Indian sitting on a boulder beside a stream, on the other bank of the stream being a thick outcrop- ping of coal; that I would take up or locate that coal, and build a town near by; that this would occur in "the Couteaux of the Souris," and that thereafter my life would lie in chan- nels utterly foreign to anything I had known before. The phrase "Couteaux of the Souris" puzzled me, and stuck in my memory.

Three years later all this actually did occur — Indian, coal, town, and new occupations. It was led up to by a series of happenings in Washington, growing out of my newspaper work there. The forecast made by Mrs. Simpson recurred to my mind over near the international boundary line, in a region then unoccupied, on a day that% began as described. I turned a bend in a stream that afternoon, and came upon an Indian sitting on a lump of rock opposite a cropping of lignite — ter- tiary coal. The rest followed. I founded there the town of Dunseath, North Dakota, about fifty miles south of the site of the pres- ent city of Brandon, Manitoba. It was some

14 Spirit Life

time before I got the finishing touch in the explanation of "the Couteaux of the Souris."

The stream where the coal cropped emptied into a river the frontier people called the Mouse. I knew it by no other name. The little river where the coal was ran between low- cut hills sloping toward the Mouse. On an old Hudson's Bay Company map in the near- est land office the next summer, I found these hills marked "Couteaux of the Souris." Souris is French for Mouse. I hadn't thought of that.

The old name has come back. I don't think the English equivalent lasted very long, though the French has lately been Englished. I was up there last summer and I heard the people call it "Sooriss."

I DISCOVER THE LINOTYPE

While my town was being built, I made a visit to Mrs. Simpson for acknowledgment, if nothing more. On this occasion I learned that still another change lay almost immedi- ately before me.

I am by trade a printer. Though I had not followed the craft since my apprenticeship, I had been in continuous touch with it through

Spirit Life 15

one or another position of editorship. The new thing foreshadowed was to be a revolution- ary invention in printing, described as a large upright frame, about the shape of a window casing, with something in it that would take the place of typesetting. It was to come to me unsought, suddenly, as if dropped from above. I was to take it up and interest others, and be the means of bringing it into use.

Within six months, one evening in the Ebbitt house at Washington, Maj. W. S. Peabody, a retired army man, showed me a metal slug having the length, height and thickness of a line of type. On one edge of it were type faces, regularly spaced in words. Slugs had been in use theretofore for galley-marks in book and news work, and in job printing for dashes and ornamental tailpieces, but this type-edge feature with its perfect spacing was something new.

The printing art had been successfully mechanized in every department save the most essential and most costly — typesetting. A good many expert mechanicians had during many years been busy trying to create machin- ery that would set type and several had suc- ceeded in all but one particular, which hap-

16 Spirit Life

pened to be the most sharply vital. They would set type all right in lines— but they could not justify the lines when set. That is, so space the words apart that the lines would be of exactly even length. Justifying (a fun- gescent form of the word "adjusting") had to be done by hand. Moreover, nearly all these tentative machines would break three or four pounds of type in a run of eight or ten hours, and type cost from forty-five to eighty-five cents a pound. Between hand- justifying and type breakage, machine-set type cost more than hand-set. The trade was in urgent need of some or any new process that would get the desired result without the accompanying cost of these drawbacks.

One glance at Maj. Peabody's slug told me that whoever made it had found the way out. It looked at first like a step back toward the Chinese method, in which an engraved block was the unit. This slug prefigured if it did not realize a method in which the line would be the unit of composition, instead of the in- dividual letter of Gutenberg's method. More- over, it spaced to perfection. I was immedi- ately interested — in fact, excited.

Major Peabody told me he had the specimen

Spirit Life 17

from a man who brought it from Baltimore. I found the man and from him got the Balti- more address. Next morning I went to Bal- timore, and there, in a little shop near the waterfront, I found the first and rudimentary linotype machine. It was not known by that name then. I gave it the name, afterward. The printers wouldn't look at it. They said the inventor was "crazy," and some of them did not hesitate to say I was crazy too.

Never mind details. It appealed to me at sight as the first practical thing up to that time produced with a view to substituting me- chanical composition for hand-set type in straight reading matter, and in that I was wholly right, as results have shown. I dropped everything else and worked fourteen months to pull it into the world — and succeeded, though for eight months I had to take laughter for my pains, and then for six months fight for a bargain with the group of people in Wash- ington who owned it, and who without some such deliverance would probably have owned it to this day, a dead one. It was a rocky road that had no turning until I finally won the interest of Melville E. Stone, now general manager of The Associated Press, then editor

i8 Spirit Life

of The Chicago Daily News. Mi\ Stone in- terested Victor Lawson, his partner. White- law Reid soon joined us, and after that there was little difficulty.

It turned out to be just what Mrs. Simpson had foretold — revolutionary in the printing trade. It came into use all over the world, and for years operated as an accelerant to the volume of print. It made possible the twenty- four page daily paper, the dray-load Sunday paper, the cheap output of books; and cleared the way for the new photographic rapid method of producing plates without type-com- position, in which I am fortunate enough to have a hand.

The inventor's name was Otmar Mergen- thaler. He completed by a process of reversal the discovery of that other inventor, John Gutenberg, who four hundred years ago made printing commercially possible. The two names shall go to future time, together. Mergenthaler lived up to about fifteen years ago, long enough to enjoy his success and the solid reward he had earned so well.

AFFECTION THAT BRIDGED THE GRAVE

While I was trying to get printers and pub- lishers to listen to me about Mergenthaler's

Spirit Life 19

machine, I traveled everywhere between Omaha and Montreal, and from the Ohio river towns to St. Paul. That was the time when I was getting laughed at for my pains.

I had a friend in Chicago representing a group of people in Scotland who had heavy interests in Canada and the United States, and this friend held to what in these days is called Buddhism. Like other men of that thought, he knew about spiritism and its phe- nomena, and took it for what it was worth, knowing full well its meretricious and mistaken side. I never have known a saner man, nor a more fastidious. He was not above visiting practitioners of the better sort, and in New York, in London and in Edinburgh, he knew of several who could not be approached save through responsible introduction.

Aboard a Pennsylvania train on one of my trips to New York it came to me to ask him for an address and an introductory telegram, and I followed the impulse, wiring from Har- risburg. When I reached the Gilsey House in New York, his reply was there awaiting me. It commended me to a Mrs. Hesse, in West Forty-sixth street. I enclosed the telegram

20 Spirit Life

with a note to Mrs. Hesse and sent it up by messenger. A reply came back appointing eight o'clock that evening, and at eight o'clock I was there.

The house was handsome, and in a neighbor- hood next in quality to Murray Hill, as Mur- ray Hill then was rated, so that I hesitated. All the media I had theretofore seen were poorly lodged, and this place looked good enough to raise a doubt, but I rang and a neat maid came to the door and asked me if I had the appointment for that hour. Getting the right answer she admitted me, just as a man and woman in evening dress came into the hall- way. The man disappeared in the direction of the drawing room. The woman came for- ward and said she was Mrs. Hesse. Then hesitatingly,

"I do not sit for more than one at a time."

I accepted this statement without knowing what it meant, and waited. After a moment of looking past me, her face cleared, and she waved me to a small room at the right, well furnished and well lighted.

Mrs. Hesse nodded me to be seated, and herself sat down, turned her eves toward the wall a few feet away, and sat motionless fully

Spirit Life 21

five minutes. Then she made a little gesture of apology, and explained.

"When you came in there was a young lady with you. That was why I told you I would sit for only one at a time. She was so clear that for the moment I thought she was in the body, but she dimmed and then showed again, and smiled, and I knew she was in the spirit.

"She tells me she is your wife. When we came into this room I saw a cloudy film upon the wall. Then I knew what she wanted. I have seen how she 'died,' as they say.

"The mist on the wall parted, and showed me this same young lady sitting in a crowed street car that was crossing a bridge over a river full of shipping. I could see the masts of ships and the tops of steamer-funnels and the smoke of tugboats — a city strange to me, evidently a very large city — and evidently a hot day. She was sitting next a good looking red haired girl. The car seemed to pass from the bridge to a viaduct, for through the window I saw below it several railway tracks with freight cars and locomotives moving about. And as I looked at her as she sat there she turned pale, and put her hand to her throat as if she would open her dress. She called a word,

22 Spirit Life

"'Will!'

"Her head fell to the shoulder of the red haired girl and her eyes closed. Her heart had stopped.

"The mist came again and covered the wall for a few seconds, but she still is here. She stands beside you now. She asks me to tell you her name is Eliza. Do you understand ?■"

Indeed I did understand. The ensuing de- scription of the appearance was an exact description of my wife.

The death occurred in a Clark street car as it crossed the river and the viaduct. It had been described to me an hour or two after it happened, by the red haired girl (I did not and don't know who she was) , and by two men who knew me but did not know this was my wife. She had died of heart paralysis on her way home after an afternoon performance of a play she had helped me write. From the back of the house I had seen her sitting next to the Reverend David Swing, and had pointed her out to De Wolf Hopper, who was stand- ing beside me. He was well acquainted with her. I dare say he remembers.

Several times between that afternoon in

Spirit Life 23

Chicago and this evening in New York I had been aware of her presence. Once as I sat in the gloaming, by a soft kiss and a caressing touch upon my hair. Again by my glasses being raised from where they dangled, and fixed upon my nose in a quick and playful way I knew so well, or the pat of a soft hand upon my cheek, a passing touch I dearly remem- bered. Another time by a soft call of "Will!" as she used to give it when I had been silent too long — little reminders ineffably sweet, that stirred the utter depths of longing, yet con- soled.

This time I was to get more. I was told she had come with me from the hotel to this house, so intent upon her errand that she did not realize her presence was strong enough to bring her into visibility. Mrs. Hesse said the phenomenon was new to her, and that the mes- sage I was about to receive being essential to the well being of our children, she would ask me to listen without interrupting.

The message was to this effect:

First, I was not to worry about our boy. He was only a little fellow, and not very well. I had placed him with a perfectly dear family named Bond, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to be

24 Spirit Life

near his little sister, who was at school in Kemper Hall — the youngest child they ever had taken into that excellent establishment. Mrs. Hesse had some trouble in getting the name of the town.

"It isn't Goshen/' she said. "It's an Indian name like Goshen, but it wasn't quite that." It was near enough, and I helped her out.

"Your wife says that is right," she said, with relief. "And your little boy is not going to be ill. He was out this afternoon, digging in his garden patch in Aunty Bond's back yard."

When I got back to Chicago and went to Kenosha to see him, I found these things were true.

I had been a widower about five years. My father-in-law and mother-in-law at Rochester had passed out a few months before, almost together, while I was in Winnipeg negotiating a railway contract. I had been informed of this, but no word had come to me about my father-in-law's estate, and indeed if I had thought about it at all it was to assume there was none, for he had met rather heavy reverses in his later years. But now I was told that in his will he had remembered our girl and boy and that a brother-in-law was taking over the

Spirit Life 25

estate intact with intent to administer in his own way.

Mrs. Hesse said my wife wished me to have the estate partitioned and to get one of our nephews, a bright young lawyer (she gave his name), to look after the children's share, con- vert and invest it in their behalf.

"She wants your promise," said Mrs. Hesse; and I gave it.

I went to Rochester and told our nephew about it. Of course he laughed at me, but he took the matter up, and to our amazement he found the case exactly as described.

The old gentlemen's affairs were by no means as meager as we had thought. The estate was not exactly bulky, but it was tidy and sound. The nephew was interested at once. I empowered him to act for the chil- dren, and he did, to their considerable benefit.

After my wife's funeral I had gone to a new house. In packing up for the change, I had been unable to find some of her belongings, heirlooms that had been in her mother's family, some of them about two hundred years. One item was a creamy fabric of old lace, her moth-

26 Spirit Life

er's and her grandmother's bridal veil. An- other was an oblong charm of old gold, used as a sachet, attached to a fine gold chain. Others were a few pieces of old china, and some of silver. Careful search had failed to disclose these things, and I had given them up as hav- ing been lost or stolen during the confusion following that swift death.

I was informed through Mrs. Hesse that in the storeroom of my new house, under a pile of trunks, in a packing-box bound with a small rope, I would find them all, and several other things that I had not missed. Search of the storeroom revealed the packing-case, with all the missing articles in it, and many more. I never had seen that box, nor do I now know by whom it was packed, nor how it came to be under those trunks.

So far as it is possible to admit general ex- planation, part of this message would be brushed aside as mere mind reading by those to whom mind reading is assumed to be an accepted commonplace. Later on I will try to explain that explanation. My own knowl- edge of telepathy discloses elements that are at least subspiritual, derived from powers mid- way between the mental and the supermental

Spirit Life 27

which I decline to believe are kicking about all over the place, where everyone may see. But the main parts of the communication cov- ered matters of which I knew nothing what- ever at the moment. In fact I had to make a journey and set up a court action before I could be sure some one or some intervening, intangible influence was not trying to fool me.

In subsequent years I had several other messages from my wife. Once, I saw her.

It was at the house of a man prominent in the business and the art interests of Chicago — an afternoon session, in a room fairly well darkened. In the company that day were Doctor Thomas, a liberal preacher then widely known; the Reverend David Swing; Joseph Jefferson; his son, Charles Jefferson; Charles Jefferson's wife; Mr. and Mrs. James H. Mc- Vicker; and a half dozen other people, all well known, all above suspicion of anything so mean as collusion, none well enough up in that sort of thing to be capable of collusion even if they had not for other reasons been above suspicion as aforesaid. And none of them save Doctor Swing and Mr. and Mrs. McVicker had ever seen my wife.

28 Spirit Life

It was only her face I saw, pallid but clear, with her own sweet smile, and a whispered re- gret that she was not strong enough to show herself and at the same time talk to me.

I heard from her in many places, many cities, for when I was traveling I was also investigating. What a weary time! How many nauseous tricks and rawfaced swindles, how many cheap peurilities, sordid, pitiful im- postures, to one true thing! I wanted to find out what there was in this belief they called spiritualism — and I did.

I found that it enwrapped a truth not un- derstood by those who sought it with selfish purposes and unclean minds ; that it was not at all the thing it was thought to be by most of those who believed it, but that it was worth while because if intelligently and earnestly fol- lowed, it led to a province of real life and light.

Once in Denver I had put in a rather wild night in distinguished company, and we had all made fools of ourselves to an extent that lapped over into a Turkish bath about the time the east began to glow. That afternoon I called upon a clairvoyant of good repute, commended by a famous poet who himself had been one of our bacchanals. And that woman

Spirit Life 29

had nothing for me but tears, the sorrow of the dear girl who grieved for me that I should be so weak. It well set down the pegs that made my music, as joyous as I was.

The last time was some ten years after, in Cleveland. She told me then that I would hear from her no more, nor have any contact until I too had gone over; that she was about to pass on to another region of life far enough away to make impossible any backward look to this one. What that phase would be she would not try to tell me.

"It is unlike anything you know of, where you are. You will know when you too are here. Be content to leave something to be learned."

I may say here that the term of contact fol- lowing physical dissolution varies with the variations of individual character. Advanced people go beyond reach or recall in a very little while — considering. Others of more earthy quality hang around through many years, sometimes even a hundred. Instance for the shorter terms my wife, for the longer my grandfather.

My wife had no religion in the church sense,

30 Spirit Life

but a fine intuition of eternal things. My mother's father held a hard and terrible Scots form of Hebraic religion, without spirituality. She had early transit. Grandfather had to stick around about a half century getting his religion knocked out of him, before he could get away to where he belonged. I know that because I talked with him almost fifty years after he had gone over, and he told me a few things with regret tempered by patience, seem- ing to take comfort in knowing quite a number of fellows who were in for a stay longer than his own — a kind of consolation that may seem open to question, ethically, though far be it from me —

THE CHICAGO HERALD

At the time I lost my wife I was on The Chicago Times, doing dramatic reviews, minor editorial and feature stuff, and being sent hither and yon, without previous notice, to in- terview big men. Wilbur F. Storey, our Old Man, was one of the five great American editors. Henry Watterson is the only one of them remaining above ground. Excepting Dr. George L. Miller of the Omaha Herald,

Spirit Life 31

Mr. Storey was the best Old Man I ever worked for. Silent, apparently severe, re- served, rigid, a master of newspaper policy and the newspaper craft, he was supposed to have a head of ice and a heart of stone. As a matter of fact he was sympathetic, quick to rec- ognize ability, generous though not showy in rewarding it. A long fight with a hard world had given him a manner that seemed disdain- fully aloof, but was in fact protective.

When I came back to my duties he sent for me. He had lost his own wife, a noble woman who had shared his earlier vicissitudes and lived only long enough to see him firmly seated in a high place of power. He wanted me to go away for a month or two, to forget my sor- row in new scenes and among new people. I was touched of course, but it seemed to me I could best lose myself in closer application to my work. He fell in with this, and to make the work more engrossing he sent me on the road, without instructions.

"If I thought you needed instructions," said he, when I had asked for them, "I wouldn't send you out."

So it was I went a-roving. The next three months will stay with me while memory holds,

32 Spirit Life

for they were the most ample of my life up to that time. I was on personal terms with every public man in the nation, and the stuff they handed me was good enough to be picked up by all the newspapers, and to start several inter- esting fights. It was a presidential year.

When I came in, late in October, I called on Mrs. Ella M. Dole, a clairaudient — a moth- erly, quiet, sane woman, who months before had told me I was going to suffer a bitter loss, the effect whereof would color and influence my course and my occupation. This time Mrs. Dole told me I was on the verge of a risky venture; that I would leave The Times, found a new paper, build it into a quick success, and lose it in a year — just a year and a few days over.

When some years earlier I was managing editor of The Inter Ocean, my desk was in Mr. Palmer's room. Frank W. Palmer's. He was editor in chief. A friendship amounting to affection had grown from that purely pro- fessional relationship. Not long after I had transferred from The Inter Ocean to The Times, Mr. Palmer lost his hold upon The Inter Ocean, and with it most of his fortune. He had powerful friends at Washington, and

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through their efforts he was made Postmaster of Chicago.

The newspaper situation in Chicago being distinctly unfavorable to the administration, it occurred to me (I was a republican) that there was room for a new paper, and that un- less I were willing to be someone else's man all my days I might as well break away and create one, myself.

I took counsel of General Logan, Mr. Pal- mer, General Grant, A. M. Jones, chairman, and Dan Sheppard, secretary of the State Re- publican central committee, and several others, who approved the idea and offered me such backing as I might need outside my own re- sources. I was in receipt of good royalties from the play I have mentioned, and other revenue of a nature like that ascribed by Hamlet to Horatio. And so, on the 25th of May, 1881, the first number of The Chicago Herald ap- peared. I was boss — editor in chief.

November showed a book profit of about twenty-five per cent. In eight months I had put a new paper round the corner. The en- tire expenditure up to that month had amounted to less than fifty thousand dollars.

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I thought, good easy man, full surely my great- ness was a-ripening, when there came a frost —

How it was worked, it took me a year to find out; nor will I tell it now, for it is done and gone, and all for the best when all is told. But on the thirtieth of May, 1882, I, being then in Washington, was informed that I was out. Utterly and forever out; and with me General Logan, Frank Palmer, and all my crowd.

It was the cleverest piece of work I've ever known, and my hat is off to every recollec- tion of the genius who put it over, at no ex- pense to himself, but at ours most sorely. He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again. In glory at this hour I hope — or maybe. At any rate he is not with us in the body any more ; and the same is true of Mrs. Dole, good soul, who saw far- ther ahead than I, with truer vision.

In respect of The Herald, Mrs. Blade, an- other sensitive, gave me warning after I had it going that I was only building a bridge for others to cross. Mrs. Blade had little enough to tell me, bad as it was, though she did emit one epigram: that it was "better to wear out than to rust out." I think I kept away from

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her after that because I wanted information, not proverbial philosophy.

There was another sensitive in her neighbor- hood whom I visited in company with Will J. Davis. She was flustered and begged to be excused, for a reason: She had just declined to sit for a caller because "a spirit came with her and told me she would die" before night. We were sufficiently interested to follow this up, and sure enough the caller (a woman) did die standing up, as it were, within two hours after the call. Her home was close by and she was easy to trace.

A similar incident indirectly connected with the big tragedy of Will Davis's life came to my notice shortly after the Iroquois theatre fire. Mrs. De Wolfe in West Madison street had declined to keep an appointment she had given a young man, a stranger, with whom came "a spirit" who said the caller would die a painful death within twenty-four hours. His name was in the list of those who perished in that disaster — a disaster for which Will was not personally responsible, as I happen to know, for he not only did not order the exits closed, but was unaware of their being closed at all. He never made this public. As

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manager of the house he let the blame fall on his own shoulders. Rest his soul! He was a good man, loyal in his friendships, and true to himself.

A FOBEGLEAM OF DRAMA

Before the change that began in the north, part of my newspaper work, as I have said, had been in the criticism of drama. Toward the close of that phase of it I had reshaped several plays with approval, and had written one comedy that had considerable vogue during five seasons. Excepting a venture in col- laboration with the late George Manville Fenn, while I was living in England, I did nothing more along that line until 1896, when the actor Frederic Warde urged me to try my hand again. I had long borne in mind a possibility offered in a short story by D'Israeli, built around an incident in the life of Skanderbeg. I outlined the idea to Fred, who offered to produce the play if I would write it. I fin- ished the script in June of that year, but the play was not produced until October of 1897.

Meantime I got into a business venture with some people at Cleveland and Toronto, and by reason of circumstances irrelevant to this

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narrative I became the centre of a six- weeks' controversy between the spiritists and the churchmen of Cleveland. It was carried on through The Voice, a high-class, clever Sunday paper, edited by Will Sage, who later won wide notice bv his critical work in the Cleve- land Leader. While this squabble was in course, I became acquainted with several lead- ing local media. One of these, Mrs. Ulrich, the first time I called upon her, told me with considerable particularity about the play, though I am satisfied she knew of me only as having written a letter in The Voice express- ing inverted laudation of certain mediumistic operations. Her statement was made without hesitation, and included a description of the work, and an irritating prophecy. It was to the effect that there would be two productions, the first a bitter disappointment to me, but the second, "a long while after," a greater success than I had dreamed of or hoped for.

Another woman, Mrs. Lake, timid and retir- ing, but very earnest, gave me identical infor- mation in the trance condition. Mrs. Ulrich had not employed the trance.

The first production was really a disappoint- ment or worse, I was ill of pneumonia at the

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time, and had no chance to be present at any of the rehearsals. I saw four performances, three at Columbus (Ohio) and one at Norwalk, before I had to go first to Arizona, then to New York, on matters relating to western in- terests that had nothing to do with theatricals. We were about to (and did) build the railway that connects the Santa Fe main line with the Grand Canon.

In New York I found two of my associates were giving considerable time to hunting oc- cult phenomena. One of these, Lowrey W. Goode, a successful man of affairs formerly prominent in Des Moines, was interested in "developing a psychic" over in Brooklyn. The name of this psychic was Corliss, and they styled him Doctor.

On my own invitation and quite privately I crossed the East river one afternoon and found in Doctor Corliss' reception room a singularly uninformed young man, a perennial fountain of monologue. He said he was the doctor's manager, and imparted a good deal of his own personal history. It was interesting only when it came to his occult powers, which had awakened sufficiently to let him see phantoms of men and women long since gone beyond.

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He said he was guided by one of these, the "sperrut of Annie Bulleen, that was Queen of England wunst." This royal sperrut had found him in the gutter and by wise counsel and watchful care had built him up. The dis- covery that gentle, unhappy Anne Boleyn had taken to prowling the gutters of New York and forgotten how to pronounce her own name had just dawned upon me in all its disconcert- ing significance when word came that the doctor would see me.

He was worth while. I got more informa- tion about that play.

First, that I had written it in room 47, Ken- nard House, Cleveland, which was true, though I had to confirm the room number later by inquiry at that hotel. Next, that I had been helped in the work by James Hobart Mc- Vicker, my friend aforementioned, who had passed over the year before. Then, that the company was in dire trouble at (I think it was) Brainerd, Minnesota — which was confirmed by a telegram that was handed me when I re- turned to the city. Then, that I would have to close it out and wait several years before another production would be made; that this other production would be highly prosperous ;

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and finally, that on an offer for the European rights, I must and would make an outright sale, because while the work would go all right in England, it would not do at all for Ger- many, where the English managers would try to put it over.

I saw Doctor Corliss that one time only. He passed away shortly afterward ; and I am not aware of the subsequent doings of Annie Bulleen nor of her chatty gutter-find. But to save the play I did, though with extreme reluc- tance, close the season at Chicago in January following. It had been a solid agony of one- night stands, plagued by the bandogs of seasons past wherewith I had not been in any way con- cerned, distrained for the debts of others, and at all points discordant, unhappy, futile and unsalaried. The two points of comfort to me were that the play itself never had drawn an ad- verse criticism, and that Mr. Warde had buffeted his way through all his troubles courageously, as a good man should. The rest of the three- fold prophecy about the play remains as yet unacted. I pray it may be as fully justified of events as the first part most assuredly was.

More than ten years before the play was written, Mrs. De Wolfe " described to me a

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vision she had of a mountain side with a bridge over a ravine, and two men, strangely dressed, one in what seemed to be armor, fighting with swords on the bridge. That was all she could see, but she said I would write a story in a book or a play where such a scene would occur.

Sitting in front at the first performance I saw of "Iskander" (that was the name of my play), this forecast came to my mind with a rush; for the climax of the third act showed just such a fight — and on a bridge. An old Roman bridge, supposed to span the river Drin, on the east frontier of Epirus. The episode was sequent in the plot of the play, and as a matter of fact was taken from an in- cident in D'Israeli's story. It recalled but was not suggested by Mrs. De Wolfe's vision.

With me that evening was E. Laurence Lee, an actor of considerable distinction, who had brought along one of his character-studies, a Chicago river bridge-tender. This operative, being then soporific through overmuch drink, was in a doze when the bridge scene culminated. Iskander, endangered by superior numbers backing his antagonist, swung over the side, ripped out the keystone, and went down with the ruin in a highly spectacular manner. The

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house roared applause. The operative waked up and found out what had happened.

"If I'd been tendin' that bridge," said he, "this wouldn't have happened."

THE SPIRIT OF THE NORTH

Thus far I have dealt only with prophecy wholly or in part fulfilled, falling within my own experience. I have not done with these, nor with the reverse side of the case, but I am going to include another, outside my individual radius, and foreign to the ways of civilization, but interesting as showing the presence of prophetic power and clear sight among peoples in an order of life less tangled than our own.

Above the fifty-sixth parallel and east of the Klondyke there are not as yet more than a thousand white men. That is a vast geo- graphical stretch. It runs up to the rim of the continent, and to the east it extends across the Hudson Bay and to the boundary of Labrador. It is rich in soil, in timber, min- erals and fisheries, and it will not long remain empty. The white men now there are fore- lopers, breaking the way for busy populations yet to be.

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Among them at the time of which I write was a really big man named Cornwallis. When Edmonton was an outpost city, he operated twenty-eight regularly organized lines of trans- portation, reaching f anwise thence in all direc- tions save south, and did more than anyone else, perhaps, to break the old solitudes and dispel the erroneous notion that the north is inaccessible and of harsh climate. In truth, as some of us knew before, it is a noble coun- try, wonderful to see and good to be in or to live in at any season of any year.

For a long time Cornwallis traded independ- ently among the Indian tribes west of the Hudson Bay, speaking their dialects and living as they lived. He is unusually hard headed, of level common sense and business ability sufficient to have made him rich. The wilder- ness has not won him to wildness. He is enough at home in the cities to be unnoticeable among other well dressed men, and he is an influential member of the Alberta parliament.

We had been talking about the Indian idea of honor, and that sense of responsibility to invisible powers which enters so largely into the conduct of their affairs.

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Without attempting to reword his story, I will give its points as he gave them to me.

His party reached an Indian village near the Great Slave lake late one afternoon and found a young squaw so alarmed over the pro- longed absence of her husband that an old wise man had been asked to look for him "with the eyes of the spirit." It seemed the husband had gone out to hunt moose, and had promised to return after two days. Four or five days had passed and brought no sight nor word of him, and they were fearful for his safety. The old man went into what looked like an hyp- notic sleep, out of which he spoke comfort. The hunter, he said, had followed a moose long and far before he got a chance to round ahead of it, but had killed it in a place which was described. He had cut it up and was on his way home, heavy laden with good meat, so near he would arrive that evening.

This was all the old man had to say, but it fitted with the facts, for before dark the hun- ter came in, packing a* prodigious quantity of moose meat. Three or four days later, Corn- wallis and his party came upon a place corres- ponding with the old man's description, and there in the middle of it lay the littered remains

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of the moose, the tracks of the man, and the ashes of his fire.

Cornwallis used to have with him on his travels a halfbreed of much taciturnity, who had a way of leaving the camp fire and withdrawing to the shadows for an hour or two. Sometimes he would rise from his blanket in the dead of night and disappear, saying nothing. They never asked him why he did it, nor where he went. He would come back and roll himself in his blanket again, and go to sleep. But in the morning before they broke camp he would tell what was going to happen that day. Sometimes it would be an unexpected deflection into a piece of country with certain features of hill or wood or stream, and the reasons for it, and what would be come upon there. Sometimes there would be other travelers to meet, in surroundings he wquld picture out. These things always occurred, just as he said they would. He got the fore- gleams while he was in the dark, alone.

"Hunches," I said, when Cornwallis told me about him. "Do you never get them vour- self?"

Half introspectively, he looked at me.

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"If you were to put in much time up there, where there is nothing but daylight, starlight, space and silence, you'd have hunches your- self," he said, and committed himself no far- ther.

Likely enough. I've known old prospec- tors who through lonely years in the mountains acquired a sense of things unseen; and there are strange tales of second sight among the Warm Spring Indians and the Klamaths in the Columbia River country and British Columbia.

I told this tale to Dr. Carlos Montezuma, born an Apache Indian, now a properly qualified physician having a successful prac- tice in Chicago.

"All Indians know these things," said Doc- tor Montezuma. "Your spiritualists have nothing to teach us, but much to unlearn."

In saying that, Doctor Montezuma sent a shaft home i' the clout. They really have much to unlearn, and very little to teach either to Indians or whites. Some of their media can use the power of prophecy, but not one of them, so far as I have been able to discover, knows what the power is, how it is directed, nor whence derived. The single fact of value to me in that

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behalf is that in widely separated cases, prophecy has actually been delivered to me, and events have borne it out.

Professor James of Harvard once said that to disprove the dictum that all crows are black, it would be necessary to produce only one white crow. Now, real prophecy is a white crow for rarity. But it exists. I have seen enough such white crows to make a flock.

A PRAGMATICAL GHOST

I had two sittings wTith a Mrs. Lukens, in Louisiana Avenue, Washington. They were separated by an interval of two weeks. I tried them at the suggestion of Dr. Phoebus Baxter, then chief medical dispensing officer of the United States Army. Mrs. Lukens believed herself to be controlled by the spirit of Leopold de Meyer, a famous musician. A more impa- tient or dictatorial control I've never come across. At the second setting I ventured to question some statement that seemed to me unsound.

"Don't contradict me," came with a burst. "I'll bet you every dollar this woman has in the world that I am right."

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I withdrew the question. I don't recall just what it was, but I can't forget that sporting offer.

The conversation went on to cover events known to me as having marked de Meyer's pro- fessional work in America. "Corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative." He or it claimed to have died the bodily death several years before.

At the time, I was associate editor of The National Republican (now The Washington Post). Two weeks later there came to my desk a copy of Freund's Musical Journal, just issued, and the first thing I saw in it was the announcement of the death of Leopold de Meyer in. Europe, the week before. I have no doubt the control was genuine, but likewise there was not the slightest doubt he was a liar. He had impersonated de Meyer to me two weeks before, while the real de Meyer was still in the flesh.

"from the vasty deep"

It is common with media to pretend to com- ply with a wish that some certain personality be produced. The benefit of a doubt may be

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extended now and then, where the medium is imposed upon by a discarnate cheat, as in that case, but their writs have no force in shadow land They can not command visits from desig- nated shades, no matter how ready they are to take money for assuming to do it.

"I can call spirits from the vasty deep," said Glendower, vaunting himself.

"And so can I," snapped Hotspur, "or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?"

Glendower made no answer to that. It is possible for a clean soul to manifest itself while it still remains near enough, but it seldom hap- pens so. Unclean ones, small and dark, come when they will to come, and can ; not when they are called. It is a rare occasion when any of them cries a truthful "adsum" to even the most strenuous requisition. I am reminded of John G. Saxe's adjuration to gabby ghosts of the bogus de Meyer variety :

If in your new estate you can not rest But must return, oh, grant us this request : Come with a noble and celestial air, And prove your titles to the names you bear;

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Give some clear tokens of your heavenly birth ; Write as good English as you wrote on earth; And, what was once superfluous to advise, Don't tell, I beg you, such egregious lies.

"the everlasting now"

Our solar system is traveling toward the star Aldebaran, a sun a million times the size of ours. Aldebaran moves in an ellipse still farther flung, toward another and a greater sun. If you could stand upon the farthest of them all, there would be others still as far away — and so on, forever, and forever. To the Ineffable that holds these endless systems in perfect and harmonious balance, there is no time, neither past nor future, but only "a universal Here, an everlasting Now."

That is obvious; and being so, it also must be true that what we call the future is quite as much a fixity as what we call the past.

To say this is not to declare fatalism, in the abject Arabian sense. I take leave to back it up with the authority of the Westminster Assembly, whose formulary after declaring God to be "a spirit, infinite, eternal and un- changeable," omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient, goes on to say that "He hath fore- ordained whatsoever comes to pass." Isaiah

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speaks of Him as "declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done."

Here is no quibble, nor any attempt to limit the illimitable. It is a declaration basal in the structure of one of the greatest of all modern religions. It involves no derogation of the human will, for will is a power, not a faculty, and the laws governing its use and direction are not in conflict with other laws.

It is there — the future, with all its happen- ings. Now and then comes a rift, a vista is opened, fleeting, fragmentary, but lucid. There is nothing miraculous about it. It is natural as anything else, only we do not understand all that lies back of it. The whole past was once a future, and it has been acted out. By chance? There is no such thing, for if all were not parts of a settled order, nothing whatever could possibly be. By the mutable will of a placable god? No, for such gods die painfully, among their worshipers. "Sweep away the illusion of time," as Carlyle advised, and the answer will begin to appear.

An intelligence moving on a higher plane of life has over us some such advantage of vision as a man on a hilltop has over one shut in a

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valley. Given the sympathetic element and an organism open to it, there is no more mystery in communication between such an intelligence and others on this lower plane than there is in the transmission of intelligence by electrical impulse over wide distances, on etheric waves. But it is a high thing, no more common than it should be. Bearing in mind the processes fol- lowing physical death, it is not difficult to understand, yet our knowledge can go but a little way beyond a recognition of the fact, and the method. Nor is it necessary we should be farther informed. When in the ascending scale of life we have spiritually risen far enough, fuller knowledge will come of itself. To desire it now is a natural part of that ferment which is growth; but to grope for it would be like grappling with infant fingers at a shoreless sea, and closing our hands on water. We have other things to do, moreover, that cry for the doing. It is a wise providence that hides from beasts what men, from men what angels know. In our fleshly condition, consciousness is reached through senses that are affected or actuated by things outside the body, and these senses are commonly mistaken for conscious- ness, though they are transitory, while con-

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sciousness is permanent. It is to the spirit the sensorium of the soul, quite as the brain is the sensorium of the body. The brain and the body "die." The etheral body is thereupon lib- erated, carrying the soul and the spiritual body within it. In turn the etheral body is cast aside, and the spiritual body, with its conscious intel- ligence, passes beyond. Consciousness remains what it was, but emerges from its obscuring folds and rises higher as these changes suc- cessively take place. The higher it rises, the more it transcends the limitation of time.

This brings us to the place where prophecy becomes possible, and where it is proper to show how it comes.

There are people so constituted, physically and psychically, that their (inner) conscious- ness may rise to contact with consciousness set free, and share in the command of vastly wider horizons both of past and future than are open to the rest of us. At such times their outer senses may or may not be active, but the interior faculty of consciousness is in temporary inde- pendent action. It retains connection with the body and the objective senses, through which it sends messages, to be delivered by the phys- ical organs of speech,

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Where this psycho-physical organism is found, real prophecy is possible; but nowhere else. Though trance is sometimes employed, such a medium usually speaks in the ordinary way, having every appearance of normality. The half breed of the Great Slave Lake was such an one. His process was simple. When he felt the intimation, he did what you hear so many ineffectual men and so many women of too much leisure talk about doing and really should do permanently. He " withdrew into the silence."

THE UNSEEN REALITIES

Gilliatt sometimes found in his nets curious marine organisms that were not perceptible in water, but became so at once they were lifted into air, and this made him speculate upon the possibility that in the air also organisms might exist, invisible there, but plain enough in an element as much finer than air as air is finer than water.

We have less ground for assuming that all life and all sense must cease when we do here, or even in another stage next to this one, than for assuming the opposite. "To the minnow/' says Teufelsdrokh, "every cranny and pebble,

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and quality and accident, of its little native creek may have become familiar," but the min- now is not aware of the ocean, with its teeming, multiform, sometimes monstrous life, its moun- tainous heavings, its myriad man-made ships. Yet the ocean, the life, the ships and the men are there, under a scopeless firmament flecked with brave floating continents of cloud, fretted at night with golden fire, the light of other worlds.

Faith in all ages has postulated a hereafter. Higher knowledge has tended latterly toward its acceptance as fact. There have been cases in which individuals still in the body claim to have temporarily reached the plane of spiritual consciousness, and made demonstration of an- other state of life ; but there is neither sequence nor continuity to such experiences, and we are told that sometimes the first exaltation and ecstasy are succeeded by other experiences of a nature too horrible and degrading for expres- sion. If you want to know more about that, read "The Varieties of Religious Experience," a book written by Professor James, who was a distinguished scholar, holding the chair of philosophy in Harvard University, a Doctor of Laws, a corresponding member of the Insti-

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tute of France and of many other authoritative associations. Professor James contributed much to this department of knowledge.

SIR OLIVER LODGE ON ETHERAL

BODIES

In his work on "Life and Matter," Sir Oliver Lodge says of those who think reality is limited to its terrestrial manifestations that they "doubtless have a philosophy of their own, to which they are entitled and to which at any rate they are welcome; but if they set up to teach others that monism signifies a limitation of mind to the potentialities of matter as at present known ; if they teach a pantheism which identifies God with nature in this narrow sense ; if they hold that mind and what they call matter are so intimately connected that no transcend- ence is possible ; then such philosophers must be content with an audience of uneducated per- sons, or if writing as men of science, must hold themselves liable to be opposed by other men of science who are able, in their own judgment, to take a wider survey of existence, and to perceive possibilities to which the said narrow and over- definite philosophers were blind/'

si

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Such a wider survey of existence brings into view a line of fact that leaves only a little for inference in explaining prophetic power, though it does not extend as far as the faculty which sets that power in action. Any philo- sophic view not hampered by tradition or coarsely physical data must discern that reality is not "limited to its terrestrial manifestations" ; that life does not terminate with the death of the body; that it proceeds farther than the senses permitted us here may trace its progress ; that we are part of a universe into which noth- ing can come, because it includes all, and out of which nothing can go, because there is no outside.

I do not know of anyone who has treated this subject with more direct sincerity than Sir Oliver, nor of any who has received with calmer mind nor weighed with cooler hands all evidence submitted or obtained. He has applied to it the methods that prevail in physical science, modifying the application to suit the difference in substance; and his conclusions seem to me unescapable. Much of the evidence is given in two of his books, "Raymond" and "The Sur- vival of Man."

His attitude is briefly and I think fairly out-

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lined in a newspaper report of the lecture he delivered at Rochester some time in the winter of 1919-20. Spiritism as we know it now had its initial impulse at the hands of the Fox sis- ters, in Rochester, about 1848. Sir Oliver referred to that in his opening:*

"To bring evidence of survival to Rochester is like bringing coals to Newcastle. Rochester began all this trouble, so to speak. Before I was born certain things happened in this city which as a boy I heard spoken of in ridicule and contempt, as outbursts of superstition. I am afraid that through the years I agreed with this view of Rochester spiritualists.

'Yet the things which happened in Rochester were only the recrudescence of facts as old as the hills. All facts are, but rediscovery of them crops up from time to time to startle the world anew. Then they are forgotten, submerged once more. We are accustomed to going through life thinking that the things we see, feel and hear are all there is. Strange things which we can not account for we are apt to regard as superstition.

"The facts regarding spiritualism were al-

*Sir Oliver has been good enough to check over and approve the report as it is reproduced in this place. — W. D. E.

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ways before the world. The Old Book is full of accounts of mediums and their work. We read in the Old Testament particularly that they were often consulted. The Witch of Endor was only one of a multitude. David was wont to go to a medium to learn of things. Saul was informed at his last sitting with the Witch of Endor that he would die on the mor- row, which he did.

" There is nothing new in spiritualism any more than was in the X-ray or argon. They were facts discovered, used and applied in one age more than another. It is the same with spiritualism. Its facts are being studied now in a scientific age and reduced to concrete form. Spiritualism is being taken out of the hands of many unbalanced people who have been asso- ciated with the subject too long.

"Whether existence is or is not is a simple, scientific question and ought to be treated as such. Death and old age are now being studied at the Rockefeller Institute by eminent physi- cians. When the researches of these men are published they will arouse tremendous interest.

"It is not known just why an organism dies. It may be that if accidents and poison, espe- cially the poison it secretes, are kept from it,

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its life will go on indefinitely. However that may be it is certain that we ourselves go on, whatever our bodies do or may do. The mate- rial body is simply an instrument we construct, a telegraphic instrument of impression. With it I am now signaling my thoughts to you, expressing them in an artificial way through a code called language, a combination of sounds. All you get from me are vibrations of the air.

"In this life we are now obliged to express ourselves through physical mediums. We are so accustomed to the material side of things that we believe that what we do not see, feel or hear does not exist, but science is always showing us things which do not appeal to our senses. All things which come must be interpreted to us by our minds. If senses told us all, then animals would know as much as we, for animals have as good senses as we; but they have not our interpretative minds, and that is the difference.

"The whole aspect of the world in our minds is different from what we see with our eyes. We look forth upon a flat dome with a surface of sky, but astronomers and other scientists have taught us differently. It is now no great effort for us to think that the world is traveling through space at the rate of nineteen miles a

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second, thirty times as rapidly as a cannon ball goes. How absurd it is for us, then, to say we can judge reality by looking at it.

"The ether of space eludes all our senses, yet it is the largest material body in the universe. It brings us all light, all heat ; it is responsible for electricity, for magnetism, for cohesion."

Sir Oliver lifted his chair in the air.

"See, I lift this chair," he said. "I can do so because ether is the cohesive force holding all its millions of atoms together. We have learned that gravitation is also due to ether, that it is ether that binds the universe together, that ether is this binding, comprehensive thing in which all planets, stars and material bodies exist. It is the most intangible, intractable thing that we know and it has no imperfection. I presume that a deep sea fish would find it difficult or impossible to discover water. It is too completely submerged; that is exactly our condition in ether.

"Why do I say this? Because I believe that ether is the medium in which we shall survive."

Sir Oliver declared that his investigations have convinced him that man has both a mate- rial and an etheral body associated with spirit and soul. He held that if ether binds together

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the universe and all things down to atoms, it must bind man together. Explaining that the properties of ether are perfect while those of grosser matter are imperfect, Sir Oliver con- cluded that the material body wears out and uncloaks itself from the etheral body at death, the etheral body going on as the house of the soul. He recalled the saying of St. Paul about man having both a natural body and a spiritual body, and he averred that it was this etheral body to which St. Paul referred.

"This is based," said Sir Oliver, "upon much scientific analysis. We find many things which go out into etheral energy. Electricity is dis- embodied matter whose atoms have ceased to be material. There is much to do yet to estab- lish in a sound, convincing way that man has these two bodies, that he takes up existence after death with his etheral body. These things I hope to work out during the next years allowed me."

Sir Oliver admitted that it was difficult for persons who did not understand life beyond death to believe in survival. He reminded us that it was impossible in past ages to ask people to believe that stones could fall from the sky. Such talk of falling red-hot stones was then

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termed superstition, but now science has dis- covered these falling stones are meteors, extra- terrestrial bodies swept out of space by the earth.

"Our bodies," he said, "are instruments of expression. As musical instruments are used, so we employ our bodies to play our thoughts to the world. It is unreasonable to think that the destruction of the instrument means the destruction of mind, the player. The player may not be able thereafter to perform to this world as before; but he may borrow an inferior instrument for expression, and I may operate through a medium.

"A medium is one who allows his or her physiological organism to be controlled by other than the usual one."

Sir Oliver spoke of religion and belief in a hereafter as founded purely upon faith. He recalled that many speak of a great gulf exist- ing between this life and that beyond.

"Is it a veil or something which removes them from our ken?" he asked. "No, we are blinded by our eyes, restricted by matter. To com- municate with us those of the other world must operate through matter."

Sir Oliver said that in 1883 he found mental

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telepathy was an indisputable fact. He said he had been skeptical in investigating it origin- ally.

"I do not know now whether ether is em- ployed in thought transfer," he said, "but I have proved beyond question or doubt that the thought in the mind of one person can arouse a similar thought in the mind of another person thousands of miles away. Tfiat fact is now established. Telepathy justifies a belief in inspiration and prayer.

"A genius feels that certain ideas are pouring into him from sources for which he is not re- sponsible. He seems to be receiving the ideas of others and using them. Inspiration may come from the lofty thoughts and worthy ideas of other minds. I suppose genius and inspira- tion are the highest powers of the medium. Every human being has the power to influence other minds for good. Our thoughts should be aspiring ones."

Fantasma and apparitions are not supernat- ural things to the mind of Sir Oliver, but mental impressions. He told of a woman- he knew who had a vision in the nighttime of her sailor son standing beside her bed in dripping clothes. She was frightened, and when she did not hear

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from him thought he was dead. Services were held for him. Six months later he suddenly returned, and it was learned that he had fallen from a mast into the far Pacific ocean and was brought back from drowning after two hours of hard work.

"His perturbed and half -dislocated spirit in those hours of uncertainty during which he was unconscious impressed itself through space upon the mind of the one it loved most, his mother," explained Sir Oliver. "It is not unusual. I could tell many instances like that."

Sir Oliver interpolated a warning here for people to exercise caution and not to receive all strange messages as truth or all mediums as capable. He said good mediums were rare and there were truth-telling dreams, but that these were not common. He termed ouija boards and the like "toys."

"Good judgment is required," he said. "Be- cause things come in an unusual way it does not follow that they are true. Unbalanced people should keep off the subject. It is better to be too skeptical than too credulous. I sym- pathize with the skeptic. I was one myself for years.

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"I am now thoroughly convinced that we survive death and go on, for better or for worse, with the same mind, thoughts and general life as before."

Sir Oliver told of his first experience with a medium, Mrs. Piper, of Boston, who still lives but no longer has her mediumistic powers. That was in 1889 and came about through Prof. William James insisting that Mrs. Piper did inexplicable things. Sir Oliver and other interested scientists had detectives shadow her to see if she obtained her information about persons through material ways. Nothing de- veloped to establish such an explanation, and Sir Oliver asked for and was given a seance.

"At this first sitting," he said, "relations of mine came through the room unmistakably. An aunt inclined to attempt to instill religion into me, came through to argue in her own voice and manner. This experience should have con- vinced me of the truth, but it did not. I thought it possible that Mrs. Piper might be employing mental telepathy, digging thoughts out of my mind and visualizing them before me."

Sir Oliver next said he had Mrs. Piper con- verse with relations of an older generation.

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Stories of their early lives were told which he later verified through talks with old folk who knew them.

But he still thought it possible the medium had obtained these thoughts through telepathic channels. It was the war which brought the proof for which he sought, at least proof to his satisfaction. Dead soldiers appeared in seances to tell of kits left at certain spots and what they contained.

"Those were good cases," said Sir Oliver. "No one on earth could have known what was in those kits."

He related many instances of that sort, in- cluding one which happened to his wif e. While at a seance Lady Lodge suddenly was met by an outburst of pleading from a soldier in the other world. The distressed spirit said it had left behind a kit which would be sent to his family. He said it contained a lock of a girl's hair and some letters which would cause his family great misery. He wanted Lady Lodge to try to have this evidence destroyed. They decided in the conversation to ask a certain offi- cial in France to help in the matter. This was done. The kit was found where the spirit said, and unlocked ; and the lock of hair and letters

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were burned before it was sent to the dead sol- dier's home.

"Much misery was saved and we are taught a lesson by this incident," declared Sir Oliver. "We must keep things in such shape that we leave nothing behind to worry over. Then we won't have to appeal to strangers for help, as this boy did."

Sir Oliver related how final proof had come to him of the truth of survival, after spiritual conversation with the late Professor Meyers, who was asked obscure questions in Greek mythology and gave answers in different parts of the world, which, pieced together like a jig- saw puzzle, gave results.

Sir Oliver declared the veil between this world and the next to be one of senses.

"Our loved ones who have passed through death are all about us, with us, trying to help and guide us," he said. "Science is gradually laying the foundation of a knowledge of the spirit world and existence beyond death which will make religion mean more than ever before. Religion is now built upon faith, but it will be built upon a solid foundation when survival is

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proved. In my view we have enough scientific evidence of survival to amount to this proof."

THE VISION OF COUNT TOLSTOI

Prophecy as a power is old in history. Re- ferring no farther back than our first century, you will find it was very much abroad among men, fully recognized in the highest quarters, and quite respectable. The thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians supply good authority for that statement. And then there was royal Saul's experience with that cynical old party, the Witch of Endor. " Confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ," if that means anything to you. Let me bring in a more modern witness :

Count Tolstoi died some time before the war. About a year before his death, the Czar re- quested his views upon the European situation as it then was, and the probable course of world events. By way of answer Tolstoi went into what spiritists would call a trance — a state of self -induced hypnosis — and in that state deliv- ered a prophecy. A young woman, a member of the family, took down what he said, as he said it. Not long after, but while he still lived, it was made public and attracted wide though slightly amused attention. Then it dropped

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out of sight and did not reappear until after the invasion of Belgium. Here is a translation in full:

"This is a Revelation of events of a Universal character which must shortly come to pass :

"Their spiritual outlines are now before my eyes. I see floating upon the surface of the sea of human fate the huge silhouette of a nude Woman. She is, with her beauty, poise, her smile, her jewels, a super- Venus. Nations rush madly after her, each of them eager to attract her especially. But she, like an eternal courte- san, flirts with alL In her Crown of diamonds and rubies is engraved her name, 'Commercial- ism.5 As alluring and bewitching as she seems, much destruction and agony follow in her wake. Her breath, reeking of sordid transactions, her voice of metallic character like gold, and her look of greed are so much poison to the Nations who fall victims to her charms.

"And behold, she has three gigantic arms with three torches of universal corruption in her hands. The first torch represents the flame of War, that the beautiful courtesan carries from city to city and country to country. Patriotism answers with flashes of honest flame, but the

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end is a roar of guns and murderous explosives which destroy the countries and slaughter the patriots.

"The second torch bears the flame of Bigotry and Hypocrisy. It lights the lamps only in Temples and on the altars of sacred institutions. It carries the seed of Falsity and Fanaticism. It kindles the Minds that are still in cradles and follows them to their graves.

"The third torch is that of the Law, that dangerous foundation of all unauthentic tradi- tions, which first does its fatal work in the Family, then sweeps through the larger world of Literature, Art and Statesmanship.

"The great Conflagration will start about 1912, set by the torch of the first arm in the countries of Southeastern Europe. It will develop into a destruction and calamity in 1914. In that year I see all Europe in flames and bleeding. I hear the lamentations from huge battlefields. But after 1915 a great Napo- leonic Leader enters upon the stage of the bloody Drama. He is a man of little militar- istic training, a writer or a journalist, but in his grip most of Europe will remain until 1925.

"The end of the great calamity will mark a new political era for the Old World. There

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will be left no empires or kingdoms, but the world will form a Federation of the United States of Nations. There will remain only- four great giants — the Anglo-Saxons, the Latins, the Slavs and the Mongolians.

"After the year 1925 I see a change in reli- gious sentiment. The second torch of the Courtesan has brought about the fall of the Church. The Ethical idea has almost van- ished. Humanity is without moral feeling. Then shall come a great Reformer. He wall clear the World of the relics of Monotheism and lay the cornerstone of the Temple of Panthe- ism. God, Soul, Spirit and Immortality will be molten in a new regenerating furnace, the peaceful beginning of an ethical era. The Man destined for this mission is a Mongolian Slav. He is already walking the Earth — a man of active affairs. He himself does not now realize the mission assigned to him by the Superior Powers.

"And, behold, I see the Law, the third torch, which has already begun to destroy the Family relations, our standards of Art and Morals. The relation between Woman and Man is ac- cepted as a prosaic Partnership of the Sexes. Art has become Realistic Degeneracy. Polit-

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ical and religious disturbances have shaken the Spiritual foundations of all Nations.

"Only small spots here and there have re- mained untouched by those Three destructive flames. The anti-National Wars in Europe, the Class War of America and the Race Wars in Asia have strangled Progress for half a cen- tury. In the year 1950, 1 see a heroine of Lit- erature and Art rising from the ranks of the Latins and Persians — the languorous World- tedious and plebeian.

"It is the light of Symbolism that shall out- shine the light of the torches of the Siren, 'Commercialism.' In place of Polygamy and Monogamy of today, there will come a 'Poet- ogamy,' relations of the Sexes based funda- mentally on the poetic conceptions of life. And I see the Nations growing larger and realizing that the alluring Woman of their destiny is after all but an illusion.

"There will come a time when the World will have no use for armies, hypocritical Religions, and degenerate Art.

"Life is Evolution, and Evolution is develop- ment from the simple to the sublimer forms of Mind and Body. I see the passing show of the World-Drama, in its present form, as it fades

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like the glow of evening upon the mountains. One motion of the hand of Commercialism and a new history begins."

The war, the date of outbreak, and pretty much all that happened up to and immediately following the armistice, came quite as Tolstoi foretold. The advent of his "Napoleonic leader" seems to have been delayed, but on the other hand he was not to be due until "after 1915" — a generous margin. As to his Messiah, Tolstoi is within geographic and historic bounds, for all the Messiahs of whom we have record arose in the Orient.

APPARITIONS

The ground now mainly occupied by the New York Central railway station at Roches- ter, New York (my native city), used to be called Falls Field. Within the corporate limits the Genesee river has three cataracts, the second plunging about a hundred feet into a wide and beautiful gorge about nine miles from the river's mouth. Falls Field began on the east bank of the river just above that fall, at the west end of what used to be called Atwater street (the present Central avenue) and stretched about fifteen hundred feet north along St, Paul street, almost to a road leading into an old quarry on the brink of the gorge. The only house there was just outside a board fence enclosing the north end. It faced St. Paul street. In this house lived my brother- in-law, Philip Block.

THE GHOST OF PHILIP'S MOTHER

Philip was a building contractor in a suc- cessful way of business. A hard-headed man,

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a materialist of extraordinary positivity, ready at any moment to take up vociferous battle with any comer at the slightest mention of life after death. He summed the whole case in one declaration :

"When you're dead you're dead, and that's all there is to it."

Anything to the contrary he held to be de- vised by preachers to extract revenue from fools. If you wanted to get him going you had only to say something about ghosts.

To me one summer morning he came, solicit- ing information about the difference in time between Rochester and the town in West Prussia where he was born. I figured it to be about five hours, whereat he gave signs of an uneasy mind.

"I don't believe in ghosts," he said, "but what was it?"

Reluctantly he told me the story.

It was a hot summer. The night before had been sultry. His sleeping room opened off the living room on the ground floor, and he had left that door and the opposite window open to such air as might be stirring. He could not sleep for the heat. All the others were asleep upstairs. He had counted the hours and turn-

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bled about and generally denounced the weather and the slow moving hours. It seemed to him a week since one o'clock, and he was trying to lie still, listening for the stroke of two,

Then he became aware of a dim light in the living room. As he watched, it grew slowly and became bright as day. There were no sounds of anyone moving. He rolled out of bed and looked through the door.

There, in the other door between the living room and the dining room, stood his mother, regarding him steadfastly. His mother, as he had seen her last in Germany, years before, in her dress of that country, so solid to his vision that for a moment he was unaware of anomaly and started toward her with outstretched hands and a cry of "mother!"

Then he stopped, stock still, and felt the hair of his flesh stand up, and a touch of cold air. Again he moved forward. But as he moved, the figure seemed less solid, and the light began to fade. Another step, and it was not there. The light sank away, leaving him standing in the dark, alone. The clock struck two.

He struck a light and examined the house, inside and out, and the ground around it. All the openings were locked save only the window

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opposite his sleeping room. Nobody could have entered through that window without his knowledge, for it had been in his direct line of sight. How did that figure get in, and where did it go ?

This question was the burden on his mind next day, when he asked me to help him fix the difference in time. In the Prussian village it was seven o'clock in the morning when with us it was two o'clock.

We made a memorandum, and I waited. Philip didn't. As days went by he convinced himself he had slipped into sleep unaware, and dreamed. But about a month later came a letter from the old country telling how at seven o'clock on that same morning his mother, fully dressed and seeming in her usual health, had dropped dead of heart failure in the sun- light, as she stood outside her door.

For a long while after that Philip restricted his vociferation to politics and business, and let the churches bide. I couldn't very well touch him up about it, but if ever our conversa- tion edged that way, he would say he must have been "crazy with the heat or something," which I knew was not a satisfactory way out even

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to his own idea, for he would revert to the same question :

"I don't believe in ghosts. But what was it ?"

AT THE MOMENT OF DEATH

Jessie Adelaide Middleton in her "Gray- Ghost" book describes an incident that parallels the visitation of Philip's mother.

Mrs. Cardew, wife of the American consul in a Highland city of Scotland, had gone to bed one evening worried because she had not been hearing from her mother, an old lady, living in California. All that day she had been troubled with "a feeling" that her mother was not well.

She had been asleep some time when she heard a loud, insistent knocking. She sat up and exclaimed, "I wonder what that can be."

The knocking stopped, and she fell asleep again, telling herself it must have been one of the maids, but presently the knocking was re- peated, louder and more prolonged, and waked her. It seemed now to come from below, at the back of the house.

As with many of the large houses in Scot- land, the outbuildings at the back were con- nected with the house by a passage having a

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glass roof to protect the servants as they passed to and fro. Under the roof was an inner back door, locked.

Mrs. Cardew went downstairs carrying a lighted candle in a china candlestick, and un- bolted and opened the door. Just beyond the doorsill stood her mother, dressed in what looked like a long white nightgown. The figure did not speak, but Mrs. Cardew cried out,

"Mother!" and dropped the candle. The figure vanished.

She went outside and looked about, but everything was quiet and the outer door was fast bolted. She groped her way back to the house, feeling certain that something had hap- pened to her mother. She was frightened to the point of being ill, but after a while she went to sleep.

In the morning her first impression was that she had dreamed too vividly, but as her mind cleared memory came forward with all the details, and she went down to the back door. The servants were not yet stirring, but there on the floor lay the candlestick, shattered. At breakfast she told her husband all about it.

That day brought a cablegram from Cali- fornia, saying her mother had died in the night.

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Reference to time tables showed her death to have occurred at the hour of apparition.

philip's daughter

Philip had a daughter, Selma, a sweet, win- some girl, who passed away in her fourteenth year. Selma and my wife were very fond of each other. They were much alike in many ways.

One summer morning we were in the back of our house in Ohio street. I recall distinctly it was about ten o'clock. There came three raps on one of the windows. I started to see who was there. The yard was empty.

'You needn't look," my wife said. " Selma is dead."

She was quiet but pale, and she went up to her room to prepare for a journey.

Early in the afternoon came a telegram from Rochester saying Selma had died about ten o'clock.

Neither of us told Philip about it. He was already sufficiently distressed.

THE MAN WHO HAD NO USE FOR GHOSTS

Risking irrelevance, I am impelled to tell of another man in another land who did not believe in ghosts.

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One happy summer in the somewhat long ago 1 used to take bus runs with Otis Skinner or Elwyn Barron to places outlying on the fron- tiers of London. On one of these, bound for Maida Vale (make you think of Dickens and Mr. Vholes?) a knotty handed sailorman with half a stew — and a perfect goitre of tobacco in his cheek — swung out of a jerry built villa and into our bus, with this remark : _ "She's a blinl^in' fool, thet's wot she is."

The bus was fairly filled with women in- digenous to that region — the sort that wears silk fingerless "mitts" and Victorian side curls. Austere women, intensely British lower middle class, looking upon the world with cold suspi- cion and unchallengeable virtue. On the toes of these matrons he stepped without apology and made his way to where we sat, proffering uninvited information of a family nature :

"She's a blinkin' fool, my darter is!"

He leered upon the matrons.

"Lydies, my darter's lost 'er 'esbun. Dead, Je is. An' she sys she'll see 'im agyne. See 'im agyne !" (with fine scorn. ) "Ownell is she goin' to see 'im agyne? 'E's dead, thet's wot 'e is.

"Lydies, Hi'm a sylerman. Thet's wot Hi am. Syled hall raound the world, Hi 'ave.

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Hi've seen 'em die hevery wares. Nytives. Wyte men. Lascars. Niggers. Hasians, Saouth Sea islanders, Howstrylians, Peta- gownies, hall over the world. HiVe seen 'em die o' fever, an smorl pox, an' heppydemics, an' fightin', an' draownin', an' 'angin', an' hevery- think. An' do yer think Hill see 'em agyne? Not me! They're dead, they are, same as wot my darter's 'esbun is — an' she sys she'll see 'im agyne! 'Ell!"

This cheerful declaration evoked sniffs, and nothing more. Seeing which, he stepped on all their feet on his return trip to the door, de- barked, had a tobacco hemorrhage, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, brought up in the wind, made a slanting run to a public house named The Pig and Hind, and entered there, leaving upon the ambience a floating state- ment :

"She's a blinkin' fool, she is. See 'im agyne? 'Ell!"

A GHOST THAT PROTESTED

A. C. Henig, a Chicago man, has built up a competence handling real estate. He used to live in Toledo, where he was well known. A few years back his brother Charles died there.

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After he had changed to Chicago some of his friends who were interested in spiritism tried to get his attention, but the subject seemed to him trivial. These friends had not gone beyond physical phenomena. He had seen Hermann and Kellar and Thurston do things quite as inexplicable as anything they told him about, and he was disinclined to bother himself by try- ing to draw a line at which human skill would leave off and spiritual phenomena begin — con- ceding their possibility, which he declined to do.

One day at noon he was going up the stairs in his own hallway, alone, as he thought. But a voice immediately behind him called him by a familiar nickname. He turned and there on the stair below him stood Charlie, whose body he had followed to the grave not long before. The appearance spoke to him :

"Howr long are you going to go on before you tear the bandage off your eyes and see things as they are?"

It was so sudden and the question so sharp that he stood in still surprise a moment. Just as he was about to speak his brother's name, there was no appearance. It had blinked away into the air of that bright noonday, and left him dazed.

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The effect was to start him in a chase for Charlie's spook, and this chase led him into many places, through experiences of many- kinds, and into a discovery of a few things far enough beyond the uttermost phenomena to be satisfying — at least to him.

THE GHOST OF MRS. CONWELL

The Rev. Dr. Russell H. Conwell, who has been described as "one of the most venerable and prominent figures in the educational and religious life of America," was brought to book by his rigidly Christian friends for having told of an experience repugnant to orthodoxy. He had seen "a form which took on the appearance of his dead wife." He had the courage to stick to the story, even to the length of writing it for The Baptist, a sectarian publication. Here it is, as it there was printed :

"I never stated that I saw the spirit of my wife. I am not acquainted with a spiritual medium and never consulted one.

"I did not expect to see the matter in any newspaper or magazine. I did not dream that the public would be interested in such a per- sonal incident. Even if I had thought the public would care to see it, I would have re-

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garded it as too sacred a topic to expose to the world's criticism. But, as briefly as I can state the homely but mysterious facts, I will put them down here.

"Three years after the death of my wife I began to see a form sitting on the side of my bed, at the foot, every morning when I woke. I attributed it to some effect of overwork on my eyesight. But after many weeks it grew so like my wife that I consulted two physicians, who reasonably said that if I would work less the vision would disappear. But the figure be- came more clear, until her natural smile and her voice were distinct. Believing it to be only a strange effect of my mental state, I fell in with the conditions and amused myself with experi- ments to see if I was in any abnormal condition. But I seemed healthy in mind and body. I regarded it so surely a figment of my mind that I laughed at it, and said to the figure,

" 'I know this is not you. Please let me test

this;

"The figure seemed to consent, and in an- swer to my question told me where my army discharge papers were which had been lost for twenty-five years. I went to the place indi- cated by the seeming voice conversation and

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found the box containing the papers behind a shelf full of old books. The next morning the form was more distinct than ever, and seemed to laugh over my discovery. Then I asked if she would come again the next morning and let me test the matter further. She laughingly said she would come once more.

"Still believing I was playing with an hallu- cination, I asked my servant girl to hide the gold pen and holder which my wife had pre- sented to me, and I emphatically told the girl not to give me any hint where she had hidden it.

"The next morning there again sat the form as distinct as often in life my wife had sat there, and I arose in bed to look closely, and said,

" 'Do you know where my gold pen is?'

"She seemed pleased, as with a joke, and answered,

' 'Of course I know. Get out of bed and I will show you where it is.'

"I arose and followed the form to a clothes closet, in which was a shelf for medicine bottles. She pointed to the closet, and when I opened the door she pointed impatiently to the far end of the shelf. I removed the bottles and reached far back along the shelf, and my hand fell on the penholder. When I took it out and stepped

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down from the chair I had mounted the figure was gone, and it has in no way reappeared. I have tried many ways to bring it back to my sight, but with no success.

"Friends give me several solutions of the mystery satisfactory to them :

"1. Some say it was surely the spirt of my wife.

"2. Some say it was a satanic spirit imitating my wife.

"3. Some say it was a case of mental exalta- tion, wherein I had unconscious telepathic com- munication with the mind of the girl who hid the pen.

"4. Some others say that it was a case of in- stinctive 'sense of presence/ which as in chem- istry, impressed on my mind the direction and presence of the pen I had habitually used.

"5. For myself I do not feel that the phe- nomena are yet explained. While I believe fully in the truth of the Bible narrative con- cerning the visits of the angels, and that the spirits of the dead 'are as the angels of God/ yet I do not believe they are subject to the call of men on the earth, and I can not admit to myself that the form I saw was actually my wife.

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"I will prayerfully and calmly wait for an- other appearance, when I will feel the impor- tance of making more careful scientific tests."

THE SPECTRE MONK

My friend Baer, a feature man on the old Inter Ocean newspaper in Chicago, had occa- sion to visit his uncle in the west of England, and brought home a memory that haunted him. The uncle's house had been part of a monastic establishment dating back to Edward II. At one side its windows gave on a ruined wall, with a space between concerning which there were vague and varying legends of treasure buried by the monks in some flurry of those faraway days when the barons used to flutter abbots who had grown rich enough to be worth shaking down. A detached incident involved the fate of one lone monk who had sought to annex part of this sunken fund and was over- taken in the act by a countryman who slew him and shouldered the treasure-bag and himself was almost immediately stricken by lightning from a presumably indignant heaven. The legend ran that once a year that unhappy coun- tryman must return from whatever dominion

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of ghostland he inhabited, and in simulacrum briefly resume the burden of the bag so wick- edly acquired in his days of nature, only to be so suddenly smitten out.

Of this tradition Baer never had heard. He was born in America, and his father had not told it to him. But in the early dawnlight of a morning when he was to "go out with the guns'' and his cousins, he was cracking a breakfast eggy sitting by himself, in a room looking to the ruined wall; and past the window moved a strange figure, that stooped, and raised up again swinging a heavy bag across one shoul- der, then slowly went away in the direction whence he came.

It was such a strange figure of a man — in a quaint cap, a smock, and tapelike strips around his lower legs, that Baer got up and leaned out of the window, and saw him not more than a dozen feet away, then saw him not at all, for he went out like a figure of mist smitten by wind — vanished, bag and all, in midstep ; and a rush of cold air smote Baer in the face so that he drew in his head and closed the window.

To his uncle who came in shortly he told this queer thing, and asked if he knew who that old fellow was. His uncle looked up the date.

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"So you Ve seen it," he commented, and told the story of the sacrilegious countryman. "It is a belief of the countryside that on the morn- ing of this day every year the poor old codger has to come back and go through that same performance — for his sins, I suppose, though it would look to me that he must nearly have done by this time, it happened so long ago, if it happened at alL"

"I've never seen it myself," he added, "but I've heard of it ever since I was a boy. There are touches like that in the history of nearly every old house in the realm." And he let it go at that.

THE INDIGNANT GHOST

Sir Alfred Turner lived not far from Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, where Thomas Carlyle passed his later years. He used to tell a story that goes very well with Baer's, about a ghostly monk:

"The people who once owned the house were friends of mine. One evening they asked me to come to dine with them.

"Inside the building there were some curious winding stairs. As I was going from the hall from the dining room I saw the figure of a

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monk in a brown robe going up the main stair- way. The people of the house being Roman Catholics, I took him for a guest like myself. When my host and hostess were sitting down to dinner, I asked them,

" 'Where is the priest?'

"They looked askance, and asked in return, 1 What priest?'

"When I told them what I had seen, they said there was no such person in the house. Further inquiry brought out curious informa- tion. The figure I had seen was believed to be the ghost of a father confessor to a family who had owned the place many years ago. The house stood where a monastery had stood in the old days. My friends who owned it are dead now, and two or three tenants have since lived in it. It had the reputation of being haunted in a harmless way.

"We held a seance there one evening, with an episode of ghostly comedy.

"It is said, and I incline to think it is true, that sometimes a particularly hard-headed, stubborn man persists in believing he is still a live man, though his body be dead and buried long ago. A former tenant would seem to have been such an one. He was absolutely unaware

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he had passed over, and went so far as to be extremely nasty about our being in his house.

"'What" are you doing here?' he asked. 'Why is the Duke of Westminster here? Why are you sitting about the place in the dark?'

"The duke was not present, but a relation of his was.

"We tried to convince the old boy that he himself had been on the other side upward of a hundred years, but he wouldn't hear of it. He gave us his name and told us we would hear from his solicitor, giving the name and a num- ber in Leadenhall street. The solicitor would give us what for, we might be sure of that.

"We thought it worth while to look the old fellow up. We found the solicitor's great- grandson established in Leadenhall street at the address given by the ghost, and verified the ghost's identity and the time when the grumpy old fellow who owned it had died."

A GHOST OF TRAGIC MEMORY

I don't know whether the Booth incident really belongs in any category of apparitions, but it was near enough to qualify in this place.

Edwin Booth's wife was the daughter of Mrs. McVicker. The name of his brother^

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John Wilkes Booth, has a sinister place in our national history. Its unhappy owner, a great but uneven actor, had often played in Mr. Mc- Vicker's theatre.

At the dark seance of which I have already spoken, I sat at Mrs. McVicker's right. One of the balls of lambent vapor that moved within the circle settled before her face, not more than two feet away, and I saw it gradually unfold — as I can best describe what I saw — and a face in profile to me took form. Mrs. McVicker gave a sudden start and a frightened exclama- tion. The lips of the face moved as in speech, but I could not hear what it said. After that it clouded, and disappeared.

After the seance I asked Mrs. McVicker whose face it was and what it had said.

"It was John Wilkes Booth," she answered, "and all it said was, 'Don't be frightened. I've only come to show myself.' "

THE BANSHEE OF THE O'NEILLS

My mother was an intensely religious woman, almost painfully conscientious — valiant for truth in a degree that wrought trouble upon us children for even those harm- less flights of imagination in which all normal

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children exercise their minds. Yet she told me (and upon urgent request, several times) that she had once seen the Banshee of the O'Neills.

The seat of the O'Neills in the north of Ire- land is Shane's Castle, on an island or near- island in Lough Neagh, County Antrim. Here, when she was eighteen or thereabout, she was one of a house party, a guest of the O'Neill daughters. Her window overlooked the lake.

One midnight she was awakened by a long- drawn, wailing cry, and saw before her window the air-borne figure of a young woman draped in black, with long black hair streaming over her shoulders. The face was upturned and she was wringing her hands ; and as she passed, she cried again the same heartrending cry — and passed up from sight.

My mother was frightened. She wakened the family and told what she had seen.

"God help us!" said the O'Neill. "She has seen the Banshee of the O'Neills." He looked at his daughters. " Which will it be?"

The tradition was that the appearance of this discomforting attache of the O'Neills invari- ably was followed by a death in the family.

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Sure enough (as they say in Ireland), one of the young ladies died within a week.

LADY FANSHAWE SEES A BANSHEE

Of the banshee as a forerunner of death in certain families of Ireland, Sir Walter Scott, in a note accompanying his poem "The Lady of the Lake," takes this story from the manuscript memoirs of Lady Fanshawe :

"During their stay in Ireland, Lady Fan- shawe and Sir Richard, her husband, visited the head of a renowned sept, who lived in an old baronial castle surrounded by a moat. One night Lady Fanshawe was awakened by a shrill scream, and looking out of her bed beheld by the moonlight a female face and part of a human form hovering at the window. The face was that of a young and rather handsome woman, though deadly pale ; and the hair, which was of beautiful auburn, was loose and disheveled. The dress, which Lady Fanshawe, notwith- standing her terror, accurately noticed, was that of the ancient Irish. The apparition continued in the same position for some time; and then, after uttering two shrill shrieks, suddenly van- ished.

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"In the morning Lady Fanshawe communi- cated to her host what she had witnessed during the night, and found him not only prepared to credit, but to explain its meaning.

" 'A near relation of mine,' he said, 'expired last night in this castle. We concealed our ex- pectation of this event from you, lest it should throw a gloom over the reception we desired to give you, and which was your due. Now, be- fore such an event in this family or this castle, the female apparition, or Banshee, whom you have seen, is always visible. She is believed to be the ghost of a woman of inferior rank whom one of my ancestors degraded himself by mar- rying, and whom afterward, to expiate the dis- honor done to his family, he caused to be drowned in the castle moat.' "

It is worth noticing, and to the credit of the ancient and lofty house of O'Neill, that no such post mortem scandal as that was kept going by the unhappy Banshee my mother saw at Shane's Castle.

THE BERESFORD GHOST

Ireland has been fruitful of history, legend, song and story — more fruitful than any other land in tales of faery, of mystic beauty, of grue-

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some fear, of heroism, of exaltation and of doom. Out of many memories, one stands clearest to me as being well attested, in which two states of life are blended in a perfect spir- itual fabric, It is known as the story of "the Beresford ghost."

The Beresfords went to Ireland in the reign of James I. When the things occurred in which the ghost is concerned, Sir Tristram and Lady Beresford had for their residence Lexlip Castle on the River Liffey, about ten miles out of Dublin and not far from Maynooth. The seat of the Tyrone was near by, and the two fami- lies were on terms of close friendship. The Earl of Tyrone was a bachelor.

The Reverend Bourchier Wrey Savile, rec- tor of Shillingford parish in Devon, briefs the introductory passage of the story thus :

"One morning the Lady Beresford appeared at the breakfast table deadly pale, with evident tokens of something having happened in the night. Her husband noticed a black ribbon round her wrist, and asked whether the wrist had been hurt. She said no, but told him she wished he would never ask her reason for wear- ing the ribbon.

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'You will never more see me without it," she said. "I would not for a moment conceal anything from you that concerned you as a husband to know. I never in my life refused you anything you requested, but of this I must entreat you to forgive my refusal, and never again to mention the subject."

A little later in the day word came that Lord Tyrone had died suddenly, in the night. Not long after, Lady Beresford's son Marcus was born. Seven years later, Lord Beresford died. Lady Beresford married again.

Years passed, until Lady Beresford's forty- seventh birthday drew near. There was a prophecy of her death on that anniversary. On it she died, but in expectation of death, she had written the whole story, to be read by her son and by an old and intimate friend. As handed down, it runs :

"My dear son, and you, my beloved friend whom I have so long known, I have something of the greatest importance to communicate to you before I die, a period which is not far dis- tant. You know the terms of friendship which existed between the late Earl of Tyrone and myself; how we were thrown much together when orphans, possessing the same guardian,

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who unhappily endeavored to imbue us with his own principles of religious infidelity, in which, alas, he met with too great success. After many years of skepticism and doubt, we made a mutual agreement that whoever should die first would, if permitted by the Almighty, appear to the other and testify to the truth or falsity of revealed religion.

"Accordingly, one night I awoke suddenly from a sound sleep, and found to my horror Lord Tyrone sitting by my bedside. I screamed out,

" Tor heaven's sake, Lord Tyrone, what brings you here at this time of night?'

' 'Have you then forgotten our promise?' said he, in a manner of awful solemnity. 'Did we not mutually engage to appear to each other after death ? I have just quitted the world, and am now permitted to appear to you for the purpose of assuring you of the truth of revealed religion, and that it is the only one by which we can be saved. I am further suffered to inf oral you that you will in due time give birth to a son, that you will become a widow and marry again, and that you will die on your forty-seventh birthday.'

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" 'Good heaven!' cried I, 'can not I prevent this?'

'Yes/ he replied, 'you are a free agent, and can prevent it by abstaining from a second mar- riage. Hitherto you have had no trials. More I am not permitted to tell you, but if after this warning you persist in infidelity as regards reli- gion, your lot in another world will be most miserable.'

" 'May I not ask,' said I, 'if you are happy?' 'Had I been otherwise,' said he, 'I would not have been allowed to appear to you.'

'May I then infer that you are happy V He smiled.

'But how?' said I, 'when the morning comes, shall I know that your appearance before me has been real, and not the mere phantom of a dream?'

" 'Will not the news of my death convince you?'

'No,' I replied, 'I might have had such a dream, and that dream might accidentally be- come true. I wish for some stronger proof of its reality.'

'You shall have it,' said he; then waving his hand, the crimson velvet bed-curtains were

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instantly drawn through a large iron hoop by which the tester of the bed was suspended. 'In that you cannot be mistaken; no mortal arm could have performed this.'

" 'True/ I replied, 'but asleep we sometimes possess much greater strength than awake. Although I could not have done this when awake, I might have done it in my sleep, and I still have doubt.'

"He then proceeded to write his name in my pocketbook, which was lying on my table, re- marking, 'You know my handwriting/

'Nevertheless/ I said, 'though I could not imitate your handwriting when awake, I might do so in my sleep/

'You are hard of belief indeed. I must not touch you ; it would injure you irreparably. It is not for spiritual bodies to touch mortal flesh/

'I do not regard a small blemish/ said I.

" 'You are a courageous woman/ said he. 'Then hold out your hand/

"He touched my wrist. His hand was cold as ice! In an instant eveiy sinew and nerve shrunk, leaving an indelible mark as if a pair of hot pincers had gripped me,

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" 'Now/ said he, 'let no mortal eye while you live behold that wrist ; to see it would be sacri- lege/

"He rose from his seat, walked a few steps from the bed, and laid his hand on a bureau which always stood in the room.

" 'In the morning,' he added, 'when you be- hold this, you will find another proof that what you have seen and heard this night is not an idle dream, or the mere fancy of your brain.'

"He stopped— I turned to look at him again — he was gone.

"During the time I had conversed with him, my thoughts were perfectly calm and collected, but the moment he had departed I felt chilled with terror, a cold perspiration came ever me. In this state of terror and agitation I lay for some time, until a flood of tears came to my relief, and I dropped asleep.

"In the morning when I awaked I found Sir Tristram had got up without noticing anything that had happened during the night. On ris- ing, I found my pocketbook lying in its usual place, with some pencil marks inside which I knew at once to be in the handwriting of Lord Tyrone. I took a piece of black ribbon and bound it tightly round my wrist, which pre-

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sented the appearance of having been scarred and burnt during the night ; and then, turning to the bureau, I observed the impression of a man's hand deeply burnt into the lid.

"I was overcome with agitation, and on de- scending to breakfast the horrors of the night had left such tokens on my countenance that my husband naturally inquired after my health and what had happened to distress me so much.

" Quieting him as well as I could, I informed him of these two events: First, that Lord Tyrone had died on the preceding night; and that in due time I would give birth to a son. Sir Tristram kindly desisted from any further importunities. A few hours later proved the truth of the information regarding Lord Tyrone's death by a dispatch from his steward confirming the painful news; and several months after this you, my son, were born, to the great joy of your father as well as myself.

"I pass over the intervening twenty years between that night and the present time. Mindful of what the apparition had predicted respecting my death on my forty-seventh birth- day, I hoped he was mistaken, believing that had passed a year ago ; I therefore determined to celebrate my forty-eighth birthday, as I

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thought, in the way we have been doing today. The information I have just learned from an authority which I cannot doubt tells me I was mistaken, and convinces me that I have only a few hours to live. But I bless God that death has now no terrors for me. I have learnt the truth of revealed religion, and trusting solely to the death and merits of my Savior for my hopes of happiness hereafter, I can depart in peace. When I am dead, as concealment is no longer necessary, I request that you, my beloved friend, will unbind my wrist, take from it the black ribband, and let my son behold it with yourself."

Lady Beresf ord then expressed a wish to be alone, with the intention of endeavoring to compose herself to sleep. Sir Marcus (her son) immediately quitted the room, and called his mother's attendants, having desired them to wratch their mistress attentively, and should they observe any change in her, to call them instantly.

An hour passed. They listened at the door, but no sound was heard. Then a bell rang, violently. They flew to her apartment, and as they went, they heard the servants crying out:

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"O, she is dead! The mistress is dead!" Young Sir Marcus and his mother's friend sent them out of the room, and proceeded to carry out Lady Beresford's dying request. They lifted her hand, loosed the ribbon, and found the wrist in exactly the condition she had described, every nerve withered, and the sinews shrunken.

"Such/' says the reverend chronicler, "is the story which has been preserved in the family. The bureau which was in Lady Beresford's room on that memorable night of the apparition still is there ; and I have now before me a letter written by a lady connected with the family, who remarks, 'Colonel Blackler told me he had often seen the chest of drawers with the mark of a hand on it, which was attributed to the ghost having touched it.' "

"the veil of disembodied spirits"

The same Reverend Bourchier Wrey Savile put of record a few other cases of apparitions, some drawn from holy writ, some experienced by himself, some so attested as to leave in his mind no room for any question of verity.

"Concerningthe innumerable instances of ap- paritions of departed persons revealing them-

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selves to those on earth," he says, "I would ask if it is not possible to conceive that at the con- vulsive moment which separates soul and body, there may be evolved a transient condition of being, entirely separate from spirit, soul, and body in its present state ? It may be regarded as the veil of the disembodied spirit — a species of vaporous essence, invisible in its normal state, but during the brief space of its new condition, exercising some of the properties of matter.

"If it be objected that this essence is in a form so subtle as to be incapable of acting on matter, or of affecting the eye or ear, we can point to the most subtle and invisible of fluids, like electricity, from which, as science teaches, the most powerful agents are obtained. It is not a little remarkable that the profound con- templations of Sir Isaac Newton, as set forth in his work on Optics, should have led him to the following inquiries:

" 'Is not heat conveyed through a vacuum by the vibrations of a much more subtle medium than air? Is not this medium the same by which light is refracted, and communicates heat to bodies, and is put into fits of easy transmis- sion and reflection? Do not hot bodies commu- nicate their heat to cold ones by the vibration

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of this medium? And is it not more rare and subtle than the air, and exceedingly more elas- tic and active ? And does it not readily pervade all bodies? And is it not by its elastic force expanded through all the heavens?'

"All these questions were in a measure an- swered by Sir Humphrey Davy, when consid- ering heat in referring to motion, he pointed out that it seems possible to account for all the phenomena of heat, if it be supposed that in solids the particles are in a state of vibration, those of the hottest bodies moving with the greatest velocity ; and that in liquid and elastic fluids, besides the vibratory motion, the par- ticles move round their own axes with different velocities.

"This refers to three states of matter — the solid, the fluid, the gaseous or aeriform ; but when heat becomes radiant we can only explain its complete analogy to light by supposing that motion is communicated to the particles of a luminiferous ether."

These comparatively ancient explanations would, upon consideration, seem to anticipate in part and in part be negative to Einstein's somewhat cryptic declaration of etheral sub- stance. But the latest edition of Webster's

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Dictionary dismisses ether as a known element in nature, "supposed to fill all known space, even those portions occupied by fluids and solids"; and Webster is ultimate authority in the meaning of words.

"If then," proceeds our reverend Wrey Sa- vile, "we admit the possibility of the existence of such a transition state in the condition of 'body, soul and spirit,' the supernatural fea- tures would be referable to the circumstance that the spirit, as the surviving and superior essence accomplishing what was impossible while wholly clad in its fleshly garment, might annihilate time and space and in the image and reflection of the form from which it has hardly escaped, be itself the bearer of the tidings of its own dissolution. Who can say but that these mysterious visitations, instead of being as some allege the suspension or supercession of natural laws, may prove to be rather the com- plete fulfillment of one of the most beautiful and interesting of the marvelous code? '

Tennyson puts the same question:

"Dare I say No spirit ever brake the band That stays him from his native land

Where first he walked when clasped in clay?

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"No visual shade of some one lost But he, the spirit himself, may come, Where all the nerve of sense is dumb ;

Spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost."

In one of his "Letters to a Lady" von Hum- boldt wrote on this subject:

"That a beloved friend, in the moment of dissolution, may gain power over the elements, and in defiance of the laws of nature be able to appear to us, would be perfectly incompre- hensible if it were not for the half defined feel- ing in our hearts that it may be so. It is quite probable that a very earnest desire might give strength sufficient to break through the laws of nature. But there may be needed a pecu- liar disposition for the perception of a spirit, and we may be often unconsciously in the pres- ence of disembodied souls."

' Often unconsciously?" Yes. But how often has the reader of these lines been acutely, disquietingly conscious of the presence of a definite yet invisible personality, by an impres- sion strong enough to push away all else from the mind? The visible are dreaded, the invis- ible disturb. But the visible are infrequent, the invisible are all around us. "Millions of unseen creatures walk the earth," intoned our

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mighty Milton, "unseen, by day and night, whether we wake or sleep." And our gentler Longfellow tells us soothingly that

"All houses wherein men have lived and died Are haunted houses. Through the open door

The harmless phantoms on their errands glide With feet that make no sound upon the floor."

A NATURAL BODY AND SPIRITUAL BODY

The Reverend Savile in his collection of au- thenticated accounts of apparitions makes an essay remarkable for its understanding, con- sidering the date — 1880, when dogmatic reli- gion was vigorously inculcating the doctrine of individual immortality and savagely reject- ing actual proofs of that same doctrine. "If," says he, "as St. Paul teaches in writing to the Corinthians, there go to make up as the person- ality of man 'a natural body and a spiritual body;' if the Bible declares that these coexist, while life endures, in each of us; if the same apostle intimates that the spiritual body can and does detach itself to some extent or other, for a time, from the material flesh and blood with which it is so closely allied, as he says him- self, 'I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell ; God

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knoweth;) such a one caught up to the third heaven;' . . . and if death be but the going forth of the spiritual body from its temporary associate; then at the moment of its exit it is that spiritual body, which through life may have been occasionally and partially detached from the natural body, and which at length is thus entirely separated from it and passes into an- other state of existence, waiting patiently for the morn of resurrection when as the Psalmist teaches it will awake from the sleep of the grave to be satisfied with the likeness of God ; if then Scripture teaches that the spiritual body, while still connected with its earthly associate may, in certain circumstances, appear distinct from the natural body, and perceptible to human vision, if not to human touch ; why should not the same spiritual bod}^, after its final emancipation from the trammels of the flesh, be permitted to ap- pear again on earth and show itself to man? The improbability arising from the rarity of such an occurrence is no disproof of the fact. One true and well authenticated report of the appearance of a departed person may give rise to many false reports of similar incidents ; but universal and unconcerted testimony on be- half of a 'supernatural' manifestation of the

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dead cannot always be untrue. Such a prodigy is too singular in its nature to become the sub- ject of general invention. It will scarcely be possible for those v/ho are uninfluenced by pop- ular prejudice to believe that apparitions would have been vouched for in all countries had they never been seen in any.

THE PERSISTENCE OF SPIRITS

"No difference in race, religion, language or civilization, no argument nor reason, has up- rooted from the heart of mankind in general this deepseated belief of the occasional appear- ance of departed spirits to persons living in the 'natural' world. The patriarch Job and the Roman Brutus professed to have seen spiritual beings; and similar manifestations have been made to men in every age. The belief in them is equally an element in sacred, classical, and modern literature. That the spirits of departed persons might and occasionally did appear was a doctrine held by some of the wisest and most devout men that ever existed.'

"Baxter, in his 'Saint's Everlasting Rest,' says : Tor my own part, though I am as sus- picious as most in such reports, and do believe that most of them are conceits or delusions, yet

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having been very inquisitive in all such cases, I have received undoubted testimony of the truth of such apparitions. . . . The writings of Gregory, Augustine, Chrysostom, and others, make frequent mention of apparitions, and relate the several stories at large. . . . Lavater, a learned, godly divine, who hath writ- ten a book (De Spectris) wholly on appari- tions, tells us that it was then an undeniable thing, confirmed by the testimonies of many credible persons, both men and women, who sometimes by night and sometimes by day have both seen and heard such things, confessing they were the souls of such and such persons lately departed.' "

Addison wrote in The Spectator: "I think a person who is terrified with the imagination of ghosts and spectres much more reasonable than one who, contrary to the report of all historians — sacred and profane, ancient and modern — and to the traditions of all nations, thinks the appearance of spirits fabulous and groundless. I might add that not only the his- torians, to whom we may join the poets, but likewise the philosophers of antiquity, have favoured this opinion."

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Good old Doctor Watts, whose hymns have been nasalized by several generations, certainly was a godly man, ceaseless in promoting the fear of God in some hearts as against the fear of hell in all. Doctor Watts wrote a valuable essay bearing a title that would push a mod- ern headline writer from his stool: "On the Proof of a Separate State of Souls between Death and the Resurrection." In this airy skit he says :

"I cannot help taking notice that the multi- tude of narratives which we have heard of in all ages, of the apparitions of the spirits or ghosts of persons departed from this life can hardly be all delusion and falsehood. Scripture seems to mention such sort of ghosts or appearances of souls so departed. Matt, xiv, 26 : when the disciples saw Jesus walking on the water, 'they thought it had been a spirit;' and Luke xxiv, 37: after His resurrection they saw Him at once appearing in the midst of them, and they supposed they had seen a spirit; and our Sa- viour doth not contradict their notion, but agrees with them the supposition of its truth : 'A spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.' And in Acts xxiii, 8, the word 'spirit' seems to signify the apparition of a de-

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parted soul, where it is said, 'The Sadducees say there is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit;' and verse 9, 'if a spirit or an angel had spoken to this man' ... A spirit here is plainly distinct from an angel, and what can it mean but an apparition of a human soul which has left the body?"

In the eighteenth century, those great lights of our law and literature, Blackstone, Dod- dridge, Goldsmith, Johnson, believed they had seen apparitions of people they had known in the earthly state. In "Rasselas," Johnson makes Imlac say: "That the dead are seen no more I will not undertake to maintain against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opin-> ion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those that never heard of another world would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience could have rendered credible. That it is doubted by single cavilers can very little weaken the general evidence; and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears."

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Of this consideration Byron stated for at least once in his life a serious conclusion:

"I merely mean to say what Johnson said,

That in the course of some six thousand years All nations have believed that from the dead

A visitant at intervals appears. And what is strangest upon this strange head

Is, that whatever bar the reason rears 'Gainst such belief, there's something stranger still

In its behalf, let those deny who will."

THE FAMOUS WYNYARD GHOST

The Wynyard ghost is probably the most voluminously attested of all apparitions — and the most persistent, for though it manifested over a hundred years ago, still it walks. Walks, but never talks.

The story amounts to a tradition in the Brit- ish army. It was first told to me by a British officer in Montreal, then again and in terms almost identical by Major English of the 14th Hussars, at the United Service Club, in London. Later I found it in a book of choice horrors in one of those rare book shops that used to make High Holborn so interesting. I bought the book, and from it copy here and thus :

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On the 15th of October, 1785, about 4 p. m., and therefore in broad daylight, two young officers of the 83rd regiment of the line were sitting together engaged in study in a room belonging to a block house at Sydney, in the island of Cape Breton, which formed the usual quarters of officers whose regiments were serv- ing in Canada. The room in question had two doors, one opening on an outer passage, the other into a bedroom, from which there was no exit except through the sitting room.

These officers, who became distinguished in their profession, were subsequently known as Sir John Sherbroke and General Wynyard.

As they were pursuing their studies, Sher- brooke, happening to look up from the book he was reading, saw beside the door, which opened on the passage, the figure of a tall youth, of about twenty years of agte, whose appearance was that of extreme emaciation. Astonished at the presence of a stranger, espe- cially as the figure appeared clad in a light indoor costume, while they wore furs and wraps owing to the severity of the weather, Sherbroke called the attention of his companion to their unexpected visitor.

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"I have often heard/' he was wont to say when subsequently relating the incident, "of a man being as pale as death, but I never saw a living face assume the appearance of a corpse as Wynyard's did at that moment."

Both the officers remained silently gazing at the figure as it slowly passed through the room, and entered the bed-chamber, casting on young Wynyard, as Sherbroke thought, a look of intense melancholy affection. The oppression of its presence was no sooner removed than Wynyard, grasping his friend's arm, exclaimed in a whisper,

"Why, good God, that's my brother!"

'Your brother!" replied Sherbroke, know- ing that the brother was then in England, "what can you mean? There must be some deception in this."

And with that he instantly rushed into the bedroom, followed by his friend. Not a soul was there ! They searched in every part, until thoroughly convinced that the room was un- tenanted. Wynyard persisted in declaring that he had seen the apparition of his brother, while Sherbroke was inclined to regard it as a delu- sion, or probably a trick played by their brother officers.

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They took note of the day and hour in which the event had happened, but they resolved not to mention the occurrence in the regiment, and gradually they persuaded each other that they had been the subject of some unaccountable delusion. Nevertheless they waited with great anxiety for letters from England, communica- tion between the two countries being very dif- ferent, both as regards speed and regularity, from what it is now. Consequently they had to wait for a considerable length of time, during which the anxiety of Wynyard became so ap- parent and distressing that his brother officers, in spite of his resolution to the contrary, finally won from him the confession of what he had seen.

The story was quickly bruited abroad, and naturally produced great excitement through- out the regiment. When the long expected mail at length arrived, there were no letters for Wynyard, but one for Sherbroke. As soon as he had opened the packet, he beckoned his friend from the room. Expectation was at its climax during the hour in which the two friends remained closeted together. On their return to the mess room the mystery was solved. The

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letter for Sherbroke was from a brother officer in England, the first line of which read thus :

"Dear John, break to your friend Wynyard the death of his favorite brother."

He had suddenly expired on the very day, and making due allowance for difference of latitude, at the very time at which the friends saw the apparition in Canada.

Although it might be supposed that this solemn event would have been sufficient to con- vince Sherbroke of its truth, his mind was so strongly prepossessed against the possibility of any supernatural intercourse with the dead, that he still entertained a doubt of the report of his senses, supported as their testimony was by the coincidence of a vision and a fact. Some years after, however, Sherbroke had a singular confirmation of its truth. Walking one day down Piccadilly, he saw on the opposite side of the street a gentleman whom he instantly recog- nized as the exact counterpart of the mysterious apparition which had been seen in Canada. Crossing over the way he accosted the stranger, and after apologizing for the intrusion learned that he was a Mr. Hayman, who was noted for his resemblance to the deceased officer, John Wynyard, and who affected to dress like him,

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The truth of this marvelous tale, of so un- usual a character compared with ordinary ghost stories from the fact that the apparition was seen by two persons in broad daylight, one of whom had never seen the deceased party in his life, has been confirmed by a great number of persons who have investigated the matter.

Some years ago Sir John Harvey, Adju- tant General of the Forces in Canada, for- warded a series of questions to Colonel Gore, of the same garrison, who was in the regiment with Sherbroke and Wynyard at the time of its occurrence, to which he replied as follows: That he was present at Sydney when the inci- dent happened. It was at the then new barrack, which wras so blocked up with ice as to have no communication with any other part of the world. He was one of the first persons who entered the room after the apparition had passed through, and as he says "went into J. Wynyard's bedroom, the window of which was puttied down." The next day he suggested to Sherbroke the propriety of making a careful memorandum of every particular connected with the incident, which was then done. Col- onel Gore adds: "I remember on the 6th of June our first letters from England brought

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the news of John Wynyard's death, which had happened on the very night they saw his ap- parition."

Captain Henry Scott, R. N., who was Assis- tant Surveyor of Nova Scotia when Sir John Sherbroke was governor of that province, used to relate, when residing at Blackheath, that on one occasion at a state dinner party at the gov- ernor's table, a guest happened to remark that a newspaper just received from England con- tained a most extraordinary ghost story, in which his excellency's name appeared. Where- upon Sir John Sherbroke, with much emotion, quickly replied,

"I earnestly beg that the subject may not be again mentioned."

The impression on the minds of the company being that he considered the matter too awful to be talked about on such an occasion.

Captain Harvey Scott subsequently wrote to Robert Dale Owen, then United States Am- bassador at the court of Naples, the following account of what he had heard on the subject: "About six years ago, dining alone with my dear friend, now gone to his account, General Paul Anderson, C. B., I related to him the story of Wynyard's apparition, in substance

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exactly as you have it. When I had finished, 'It is extraordinary enough/ said he, 'that you have related the story almost verbatim as I heard it from Sir John Sherbroke's own lips a short time before his death.' (May, 1830.) I asked the General whether Sir John ex- pressed any opinion about the incident. 'Yes/ he replied, 'he assured me in the most solemn manner that he believed the appearance to have been a ghost or spirit; and added that this belief was shared by his friend Wynyard.' General Anderson was a distinguished Penin- sular war officer, a major under Sir John Moore, and one of those who assisted to bury that gallant general.

"I would only add that this remarkable story, which has been investigated by so many per- sons, affords as clear an instance of the truth of an apparition of the dead as it is possible for the mind to conceive."

THE GHOST THAT KILLED MARSHAL BLUCHER

For grisly realism, the story of the German Marshal Bliicher is about the strongest speci- men to be found in all the literature of appari-

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tions. Lady Clementina Davies gives it in her ' 'Recollections" as having been confirmed by other officers, and by the King of Prussia, great- grandfather of the recently deflated German emperor:

In the autumn of the year in which Waterloo had been fought, Marshal Blucher quitted France for the last time. Chagrined at finding himself reduced to a life of inaction, he retired to his property, and fell into a state of melan- choly, increased by an attack of dropsy on the chest. From this time a change came over his character ; the rough and ready soldier became timid, and even nervous. He would not remain in the dark; solitude was agonizing, and such was the uneasiness caused by his failing health, that the King of Prussia started for Krieb- lowitz as soon as he learned that his old and favorite general had several times expressed a wish to see him before dying. The king arrived in the evening at the castle, and was instantly conducted to Blucher, then in his seventy-fourth year.

On seeing the king, Marshal Blucher tried to rise for the purpose of receiving his majesty, who kindly prevented him, and sat down by

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his side ; when the old soldier, after dismissing his attendants, spoke as follows :

"Sire, I entreated you to come here, as I heard you were in the neighborhood, yet had you been at the other extremity of Europe, dying as I now am, I must have endeavored to reach you, for I have a terrible secret to reveal. Sire, be pleased to look at me well, and assure yourself that Lam now in the full en- joyment of my reason, and that I am not mad ; for at times, I almost think I am deluded into mistaking recollections of past events for visions of the present.

"When, Sire, in 1756 the seven-years' war broke out, my father, who lived on his estate of Gross Renson, sent me to one of our rela- tions, the Princess Kranswick, in the Isle of Rugen. I was then fourteen, and after a time passed in the old fortress without news from my family, I entered a regiment of hussars in the Swedish service, and being taken prisoner at Suokow, the Prussian government pressed me to take service in its army. For a year I resisted, and only obtained my liberty by ac- cepting the rank of cornet in the regiment of Black Hussars. I then obtained leave for some months, as I was very anxious concerning my

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mother and sisters, and started at once for Gross Renson, which had been the scene of war during my year's imprisonment.

"It is just fifty-nine years ago, this very day, the 12th day of August" (1816) , "and verging toward midnight, when in the midst of a raging storm, and after long wandering in the forest, I reached my father's house, drenched to the skin and alone, for my servant, bewildered by the tempest, had lost me in the dark. Without dismounting, I struck the nail-studded oaken door with the butt end of my whip. No one replied, though I hammered again and again at the door; until losing patience I jumped off my horse, when the door appeared to open of its own accord, as I could perceive no one, and I entered; and hurrying up the steps went in.

"There was no light to be seen or sound heard. I confess that my heart sank within me, and a cold shudder ran through my veins. 'What folly!' I exclaimed; 'the house must be empty; my family must have left when I quitted it, and have not returned, still I must remain for the night.' I reached my father's bedroom ; a faint and fitful flame threw a dim light upon a group of persons seated, among whom I recognized my father, mother, and four sisters, who rose on

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seeing me enter. I was about to throw myself into my father's arms, when he arrested me by a solemn gesture. I held out my arms to my mother, but she retreated with a mournful air. I called out to my sisters, who taking each other by the hand, again seated themselves.

" 'Do vou not know me?' I cried. 'Is it thus you receive me after so long a separation? Do you not know that I am now serving Prussia? I was compelled to make the sacrifice in order to regain my liberty, and to see you. My mother, you are silent. My sisters, have you forgotten the love of our childhood, and the games of which these walls have been the silent witnesses?'

"At these last words, my sisters seemed to be moved, and they spoke to one another in low voices ; they rose up and signalled to me to ap- proach. One of them then knelt down before my mother, and hid her face in her lap as if she wished to play at a game called hot-kok- hiry, a childish game, where one has his eyes bound, and guesses who strikes with the flat of the hand. Surprised at this strange freak at such a solemn time, I nevertheless touched my sister's hand with the whip I still grasped, as a mysterious force seemed to impel me so to do.

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Then came my turn to kneel before my mother, and to hide my face in her lap.

"0 horror ! I felt through her silk dress a cold and angular form; I heard a sound of rattling bones ; and when a hand was placed in mine, the hand remained there ; and it was the hand of a skeleton. I arose with a cry of terror ; all had disappeared, and there only was left of this dreadful vision the human remains which I con- vulsively grasped.

"Almost beside myself, I ran from the cham- ber, hurried downstairs, jumped on my horse, and galloped wildly through the forest. At daybreak my horse sank beneath me and died. I fell insensible at the foot of a huge tree, and was found there by my attendants with my skull fractured. I almost died from the combined effects of horror of mind and the injury in my head, and it was only after some weeks of fever and delirium that I regained my senses, and gradually recovered.

"It was then I learned that all my family had perished in the terrible war which had desolated Mecklenburg, and that my father's castle had been several times pillaged and sacked. Scarcely convalescent, I hastened to the castle

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to render the last rites to my deceased parents and sisters ; but after a most rigorous search no trace of their remains could be found, save one hand only. A female hand surrounded by a golden bracelet, lay on the floor of the room in which I had seen the apparition. I took the golden chain — the same, your majesty, which I hold now in my hands — and deposited the hand, all that remained of my family, in the oratory chapel. (

"Many years have glided by since that awful scene which I witnessed in my father's castle; and it was only two months ago, while lying in this arm-chair, a slight noise awoke me. I looked up. There stood my father, mother, and four sisters, just as they appeared on that awful night at the castle of Gross Renson. My sisters began playing at the same game, and signaled me to advance. 'Never! Never!' I exclaimed; and then the apparitions, joining hands, passed slowly around my chair.

" 'Justice!' cried my father, as he passed be- fore me ;

" 'Penitence !' exclaimed my mother, leaning toward me;

Prayer!' murmured my youngest sister.

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" 'The sword!' sighed another.

" 'The 12th of August, at midnight!' whis- pered the eldest.

"Again the procession moved slowly around me thrice ; then, with one awful voice, they all cried out together.

" ' Aieu ! adieu ! To our next meeting !'

"I felt then it was a warning of my ap- proaching death, and that I had only to look to God to receive my soul, and bid farewell to your majesty and my friends!"

"My dear marshal !" said the king, "what you have related to me is very strange ; still do not you think the vision may have been caused by delirium? Take courage, strive against these hallucinations, and you will rally and live many years yet. Will you not try and believe what I say? Give me your hand."

The king received no answer. He took the old man's hand. It was icy cold. Just then a bell sounded the midnight hour. The spirit of Marshal Bliicher had quietly passed away.

THE GHOSTS OF HOLY WRIT

The Bible abounds in stories about appari- tions, beginning as early as the eighteenth chapter of Genesis with three angels making

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an afternoon call on Abraham previous to look- ing in on Lot, to whom they passed a suggestion that he "be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels un- aware."

Then there were the angels who met Jacob on his way home from Pandanaram, and the angel he met at Panill and engaged in a catch- as-catch-can that lasted all day. And the burn- ing bush, which was in another order of simu- lacra, not to be approached with shod feet — a phenomenon of significance not rightfully per- ceived until Mrs. Browning wrote that

"Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, And only he who sees takes off his shoes."

An angel appeared to Hagar; one spake to Jacob in a dream; one appeared to Moses (Exodus xiv) ; one went before the camp of Israel; one spake to the children of Israel; one to Gideon and to the wife of Manoah ; one ap- peared to Elijah; one stood on the threshing floor of Onan ; one talked with Zachariah. On the most momentous of all nights, "a multitude of the heavenly host" appeared suddenly to The Shepherds. One appeared to Mary; one opened the door of Peter's prison and set him

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free ; two appeared to Jesus ; one appeared to the two Marys at the sepulchre; one foretold the birth of John the Baptist ; one appeared to John at Patmos ; and two, claiming to be Moses and Elias, appeared to Jesus, Peter, James and John. A respectable list, not to be slighted off, since it is drawn from records that for two thousand years have commanded implicit ac- ceptance throughout Christendom and in part for a longer span throughout Jewry.

LYING SPIRITS

Wherever there are apparitions, especially where they occur in dark seances, the danger of imposture, of false impersonation, is immi- nent. In fact it extends to all spirit contact in whatever kind, but especially with trance media. The unholy ghost who at Washington tried to make me believe he was Leopold de Meyer may serve as an example. In communications coming through media in trance, I can recall no end of occasions on which I have been favored with voluble ignorance by Socrates, Plato, and other illustrious ancients who must have slipped their feet most lamentably if they still are slouching around this earth and the boarding house neighborhoods thereof. The de Meyer

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lady's "control" went so far as to try to get me to take on Benjamin Franklin — a matter I most certainly will mention to that great man when or if I catch up with him in the (bright, I hope) hereafter.

These performances, and most apparitions, are the work of an order of beings called nature spirits — or elementals. Semiconscious forces, the Pucks and Ariels of poesy, Brownies of Scotland, Little People of Ireland, Pixies of the west of England; the low comedians of nature's borderland. Mrs. Besant in her wise little book, "Death and After," says they "play a great part at seances, and are mostly the agents who are active in producing physical phenomena. They throw about or carry ob- jects, make noises, ring bells," and so on. Sometimes they play pranks with the discarded shells — etheral doubles — of people who have passed on, animating them and representing them to be the spirits of great personalities who lived on earth, but who have sadly degenerated in the 'spirit world,' judging by their effu-

sions."

Once at a dark seance I was irritated into saying one of the noisiest of them was a blessed

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fool (reverse that adjective, please) , and there- upon I got a whack aside my head that rang for hours, so heartily it was delivered.

THE SUBSTANCE OF APPARITIONS

Spirit is matter too finely divided for our visualization. If we are to see, it must be clothed, given substance as well as form. I will have more on the subject later, but for this place let me quote old Delachambre, who says the form "of the soul" is not fixed and deter- minate like that of solid bodies :

"It is vague and changeable like that of the air and liquids, which assume the form of all the solid bodies surrounding them ; and the dif- ference is that the vivacity of the forms that supervene to the latter is of necessity, and that which is found in spiritual substances depends on their will; for as they move as they please all their parts, they also assume whatever form they desire."

This is bland, as requiring no detail, but ex- perience has shown its truth.

Concurrently, experience has shown its abuse. Hamlet had reason for the doubt that crossed his mind after he had talked with his father's ghost :

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"The spirit that I have seen May be the devil ; and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape."

Sargent says that if spirits have this (plastic) power, their capabilities of deception as to iden- tity may be far greater than we imagine. "Per- haps our own spiritual insight, purity and ele- vation must be the measure of our ability to detect spiritual impostors."

Of what stuff are these forms? We are not obliged to go to neotheosophy for answer to that. Neotheosophy would have one ready to hand, but it would be obscured by neotheosophic terminology, and formed along lines of its own neoscience — or else all precedent were unre- garded. Rather adopt Banquo's opinion after he and Macbeth had been seeing things on the heath: "The earth hath bubbles as the water hath, and these are of them."

They are formed of physical ethers, magnetic in nature, assembleable at a conjunction of causes paralleling in a more dense domain those which bring together the particles that form clouds. In varying degrees of attenuation or of density, these ethers suffuse all physical forms of life.

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That which suffuses a human body passes out at bodily death, and for a time long or short as the quality of the individual may impose, it serves as a sort of sheath for his finer infolds — - let us say the soul, temporarily encasing the spirit, the living, lasting Ego; and the memory, which is the stored up body of expe- rience acquired in the fleshly term just ended. It is really a diffusible physical quantity, well enough known to physical science.

Doctor Hills, for years a practitioner in Cleveland, once described to me the release of an etheral double from a dying physical body. He was at the time a member of the staff of Bartholomew hospital, in London, and had at- tended a hopeless case, a woman. The nurse in charge called him hurriedly one day, and put up the screens around the bed.

The death was quiet. As he sat a few moments after the last breath, he became aware of a misty appearance, faint at first, along the body. It took shape gradually, until it was there plainly enough, a vaporous duplication of and resting on the woman's form. Then it began to rise, separating from the body slowly, but retaining a connection at about the heart line, or a little above. As it rose this connection

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thinned to the appearance of a cord that lengthened and became slighter as the double floated slowly up, until almost at the ceiling it seemed to break, or rather be drawn from the dead body into the body of the double, which continued to rise until it reached the ceiling, and gently passed through as though no ceiling were there — and out of his sight.

The nurse noticed his upturned face, and asked him what he was looking at.

"Didn't you see it?" he asked.

"No," answered the nurse puzzled and openly suspicious.

DEN THOMPSON AND THE LIVE-MAN GHOST

I was impolitely treated on yet another occa- sion, in a Sunday evening dark seance of the circle variety on the west side, Chicago, where an entrance fee was charged and no questions were asked. Any lady or gent could sit in for the small sum of half a dollar, five dimes, two quarters, ten nickels, or fifty cents — as at a side- show with a ballyhoo. No other introduction was given or required.

I had gone there with James M. Hill, my partner through five prosperous years in a theatrical enterprise. Mr. Hill was manager

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also for my old and beloved friend Denman Thompson. With us was his brother, David K. Hill, of the commercial firm of Willoughby, Hill and Company. The others were strange to us and seemingly to each other — a cheap lot, not at all the sort you would care to ask to your house.

Thompson originated at Swansea, in the b'gosh belt of New Hampshire. The country- men in his play were copies of people who lived in the Swansea neighborhood. Mr. Hill had been up there with him, and had made acquaint- ance with many, among them Si Holcomb, the town tailor.

In the play, Denman as "Joshua Whitcomb" had a proud line about a suit of clothes he had made to order in Swansea by Holcomb, to wear in Boston: "Si Holcomb cut 'em out for me.''

It was a noisy seance. An accordion, a guitar, a cornet, and I don't know what else, were floating over our heads and being dread- fully misplayed. The usual balls of lambent vapor were drifting within the circle, and the "meejie" (her guide was an Indian who though presumably dead was far from being good) was delivering messages in a weird dialect and helping sitters to recognize invisible parties

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who never got farther than initials in announc- ing identity, when of a sudden Mr. Hill called out

"Si Holcomb!" and let go my hand.

Instantly the noises stopped, and the floating instruments came down, crash. A guitar struck the top of my head with a resounding bang. Hands were loosed all round, and lights turned up. Mr. Hill's release of my hand had "broke the magnetic chain," the meejie told us. The show was over.

I'd had enough, anyway. That guitar had raised a lump on my head, and it hurt.

On our wray downtown Mr. Hill told me why he had cried out. One of the vapor balls had opened close before him, and had shown the face and spoken the name of Si Holcomb.

"I didn't know he was dead," said he.

Small wonder ; for the next day Si Holcomb in the flesh turned up at the theatre. He had heard Denman was "takin' him off on top of the stage boards out west," and had come to look into the matter. His ghostly impersonator was probably some stray who in his earthy days had been a regular divvil in his own home town, and had not yet learned better than to trifle with immortal things.

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Place this experience in contrast with that other at Mr. McVicker's house, and you have a fairly good exemplification of the fact that like attracts like. Here was a mixed company of curiosity seekers, low in character value, and getting nothing but rough stuff. There was a company of high character value, really want- ing to learn. One drew loud and boisterous conduct; the other sincerity.

DARK WAYS OF THE CABINET SPOOK

The dark seance is always open to deceptive purposes; but the dark seance where the me- dium— the "psj^chic" — is in a cabinet, is about the best place I know of to keep away from. No soul still animated by a self-respecting spirit could by any possibility bring itself to manifestation in conditions that invite and pro- tect trickery. I say so after having been fed up to repletion with cabinet performances in dark or dimly lighted rooms. These are things whereof a little more than a little is by much too much. Yet they have singular attraction for beginners.

If a first demonstration of survival beyond death is even half convincing, eager credulity

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sets in and the seeker will swallow anything as easily as Jonah swallowed the whale. (Or was it the other way about? It doesn't matter. Either is good.) In perfect good faith Sir Arthur Conan Doyle accepted the case of Katy King, innocently unaware that the Katy King case had exploded mephitically almost forty years before it came to his notice, one of the rankest impostures known in a prolific depart- ment of imposition. Elinor Glyn was so im- pressed by what she saw in a materializing seance at New York that upon her return to London she wrote an account of it, dwelling particularly upon the apparition of John Brown — Harper's Ferry, Old Ossawattomy Brown, whom she described as a stout little man with whisker trimmings of the kind that in their time had been known as "Galway slug- gers," and a nervous, quick, commanding man- ner. Poor old Ossawattomy from Bleeding Kansas! Tall, gaunt, with the face of an ascetic, the beard of an apostle, the solemnity of a cold fanatic ! What would he have thought of it, could he have seen? It is to weep.

The only dark cabinet apparition within the scope of my observation that I had any reason

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for thinking to be genuine I had to take on the word of another. It was in Cleveland, in the presence of about twenty people. There had been some especially atrocious singing ("Yes, we will gather at the ree-a-ver" and other of the like) and a few baby figures, old stuff and sim- ple, when the curtains parted and the shape of a man emerged, and asked whether anyone present recognized him. Several answered promptly and said he was Mr. Wade. Sitting next at my left was Mrs. Hays, a woman of good social position. Mrs. Hays whispered that it really was Mr. Wade, with whom she had been well acquainted — the man who had given the city the fine park that bears his name. He had little to say beyond a boost for Cleve- land, and showed for only a minute or so. It may have been straight. I'm willing to give the question the benefit usual to doubt.

Mr. Perry, a decent sort, new to spookery, was called to the curtain that evening by a tall shape that said it was the spirit of his sister. They had a whispered conversation which after- ward he told me was not convincing. "All she would say," he said, "was 'I'm so happy!' She wouldn't come through with any details."

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"visions or the night'5

"Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us."

If you have such a thing as a Bible on board, dig it up and turn to the fourth chapter of Job, and there you may read,

"Now, a thing was secretly brought to me, and mine ears received a little thereof.

"In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep f alleth upon men,

"Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all of my bones to shake.

"Then a spirit passed before my face. . . .

"It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof: an image was before mine eyes. . . ."

WHY GHOSTS PREFER THE DARK

One of the most common questions asked about apparitions in dark seances is Why these things are done in the dark? The simplest an- swer I can give is that while an etheral shape may cohere easily for a little while in the dark, or in a soft light, it could not cohere more than a few seconds under the impact of light waves in sunshine, or even in the gray light of an over-

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cast day. The light-vibrations of an ordinary electric bulb are high enough to disperse any but an etheral body projected into our field of vision by a powerful impulse or purpose to be seen and probably to be heard; and even such an one would hold through a few seconds merely.

THE TROUBLE WITH THE WHOLE THING

These cases are all I care to give. There are many more I would give, if they were not touched at the edges by obvious question or doubt. Those I cite were given me in perfect faith, at first hand, and to the senses of the givers they were convincing evidences.

But there is the trouble with the whole thing. What is unimpeachable evidence to the senses of one is evidence to the senses of another only in so far as the veracity of one is credited by the other. It may inspire belief, but there is a wide gulf between belief and knowledge. Be- lief may be a subject of desire or volition, but knowledge is positive. You can believe a whole lot that you don't know.

THE GREAT RHAPSODY

"Are we not Spirits," asks Carlyle, "that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and

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then fade away again into air and invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact ; we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions ; round Us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial harp- strings, like the Songs of beatified Souls? And again, do not we squeak and jibber (in our dis- cordant, screech-owlish debatings and recrim- inations) ; and glide bodeful, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead — till the scent of the morning air summons us to our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day ? Where now is Alexander of Macedon? Does the steel Host that yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela remain behind him ; or have they all van- ished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must ? Napoleon, too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns ! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt; which has now, with its howling tumult that made Night hideous, flitted away? — Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the Earth openly at noontide; some half -hundred have vanished

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from it, some half -hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once.

"O Heaven! it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force ; this lif e-blood with its burn- ing Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our Me; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. That warrior on his strong war horse, fire flashes through his eyes ; force dwells in his arm and heart; but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, as though it were a firm substance: fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet's sounding. Plummet's? Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while ago, they were not ; a little while, and they are not, their very ashes are not.

"So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forth- issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission Appears. What Force and Fire is in

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each he expends; one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing into the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellows: — and then the Heaven-sent is recalled ; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysteri- ous Mankind thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the un- known Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire- breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are leveled, and her seas filled up, in our passage : can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some foot-print of us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence? O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.

" 'We are such stuff As dreams are made on ; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep !' "

WEIGHING A SOUL

Prof. Elmer Gates in his Washington labo- ratory about 1905 secured several photographs of the etheric body, in one instance showing its departure out of an animal body immediately after physical death; and Prof. Elliott Coues, until recently biologist of the Smithsonian In- stitution, succeeded in demonstrating it with a living human subject, and found that it had no independent power of thought or will. Of it- self, it was what Professor Coues call "soul stuff" — attenuated matter, merely.

Some years after Professor Coues made his experiments with "soul stuff," the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research gave publicity to considerable correspondence on the subject, including among others less in- teresting an article by Dr. Duncan McDougall describing experiments intended to determine its weight — an attribute Professor Coues wanted to demonstrate, but could not for lack of instruments sufficiently sensitive. If mem- ory serves, Prof. Elmer Gates got as far as

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tipping a knife-edge balance with a quantity of it. Doctor McDougall took a new way of settling the question, which I quote from his article. He says :

"According to the latest conception of science, substance or space-occupying material is divisible into that which is gravitative — solids, liquids, gases, all having weight — and the ether, which is non-gravitative. It seemed impossible to me that the soul substance could consist of ether. If the conception be true that ether is continuous and not to be conceived of as existing or capable of existing in separate masses, we have here the most solid ground for believing that the soul substance we are seeking is not ether, because one of the very first at- tributes of personal identity is the quality or condition of separateness. Nothing is more borne in upon consciousness than that the you in you and the me in me, the ego, is detached and separate from all things else — the non-ego.

"We are therefore driven back upon the assumption that the soul substance, so neces- sary to the conception of continuing personal identity after the death of this material body, must still be a form of gravitative matter, or

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perhaps a middle form of substance neither gravitative matter nor other, not capable of being weighed, and yet not identical with ether. Since, however, the substance considered in our hypothesis must be linked organically with the body until death takes place, it appears to me more reasonable to think that it must be some form of gravitative matter, and therefore capable of being detected at death by weighing a human being in the act of death.*

"The subjects experimented upon all gave their consent to the experiment weeks before the day of death. The experiments did not sub- ject the patients to any additional suffering.

"My first subject was a man dying of tuber- culosis. It seemed to me best to select a patient dying with a disease that produces great ex- haustion, the death occurring with little or no muscular movement, because in such a case the beam could be kept more perfectly at balance and any loss occurring readily noted.

"The patient was under observation for three hours and forty minutes before death, lying on

♦Please bear In mind that Doctor McDougall's conclusion was drawn a few years before Einstein's discovery that light is re- sponsive to gravitative pull — a discovery which validated Sir Isaac Newton's surmise, and had been postulated though not worked out by modern scientists. — W. D. E.

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a bed arranged on a light framework built upon very delicately balanced platform beam scales. The patient's comfort was looked after in every way, although he was practically moribund when placed upon the bed. He lost weight slowly at the rate of one ounce per hour, due to evaporation of moisture in respiration and evaporation of sweat.

"At the end of three hours and forty minutes he expired, and suddenly coincident with death the beam end dropped with an audible stroke, hitting against the lower limiting bar and re- maining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce.

"The loss of weight could not be due to evap- oration of respiratory moisture and sweat, be- cause that had already been determined as go- ing on, in his case, at the rate of one-sixtieth of an ounce per minute, whereas this loss was sudden and large, three-fourths of an ounce in a few seconds.

"The bowels did not move; if they had moved, the weight would still have remained upon the bed except for a slow loss by the evap- oration of moisture ; depending, of course, upon the fluidity of the foeces. The bladder evacu- ated one or two drachms of urine. This re-

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mained upon the bed, and could only have influ- enced the weight by slow gradual evaporation, and therefore in no way could account for the sudden loss.

"There remained but one more channel of loss to explore — the expiration of all but the residual air in the lungs. Getting upon the bed myself, my colleague put the beam at actual balance. Inspiration and expiration of air as forcibly as possible by me had no effect upon the beam. My colleague got upon the bed, and placed the beam at balance. Forcible in- spiration and expiration of air on his part had no effect. In this case we certainly have an inexplicable loss of weight of three-fourths of an ounce. Is it the soul substance ? How else shall we explain it?

"My second patient was a man moribund from consumption. He was on the bed about four hours and fifteen minutes under observa- tion before death. The first four hours he lost weight at the rate of three-fourths of an ounce per hour. He had much slower respiration than the first case, which accounted for the dif- ference in loss of weight from evaporation and respiratory moisture.

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"The last fifteen minutes he had ceased to breathe, but his facial muscles still moved con- vulsively, and then, coinciding with the last movement of the facial muscle, the beam dropped. The weight lost was found to be half an ounce. Then my colleague auscultated the heart and found it stopped. I tried again, and the loss was one ounce and a half and fifty grains. In the eighteen minutes that elapsed between the time he ceased breathing until we were certain of death, there was a weight loss of one and one-half ounces and fifty grains, compared with a loss of three ounces in four hours during which time the ordinary channels of loss were at work. No bowel movement took place. The bladder moved, but the urine re- mained upon the bed, and could not have evap- orated enough through the thick bed clothing to have influenced the result.

"The beam at the end of eighteen minutes of doubt was placed again with the end in slight contact with the upper bar, and watched for forty minutes, but no further loss took place.

"My scales were sensitive to two-tenths of an ounce. If placed at balance, one-tenth of an ounce would lift the beam up close to the upper limiting bar, another one-tenth ounce

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would bring it up and keep it in direct contact, then if the two-tenths were removed the beam would drop to the lower bar and then slowly oscillate till balance was reached again.

"This patient was of a totally different tem- perament from the first. His death was very gradual, so that we had great doubt from the ordinary evidence to say just what moment he died.

"My third case, a man dying of tuberculosis, showed a weight of half an ounce lost, coinci- dent with death, and an additional loss of one ounce a few minutes later.

"In the fourth case, a woman dying of dia- betic coma, unfortunately our scales were not finely adjusted, and there was a good deal of interference by people opposed to our work; and although at death the beam sunk so that it required from three-eighths to one-half ounce to bring it back to the point preceding death, yet I regard this test as of no value.

"My fifth case, a man dying of tuberculosis, showed a distinct drop in the beam requiring about three-eighths of an ounce which could not be accounted for. This occurred exactly simul- taneously with death ; but peculiarly, on bring- ing the beam up again with weights and later

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removing them, the beam did not sink back to stay back for fully fifteen minutes. It was impossible to account for the three-eighths of an ounce drop, it was so sudden and distinct, the beam hitting the lower bar with as great a noise as in the first case. Our scales in this case were very sensitively balanced.

"My sixth and last case was not a fair test. The patient died almost within five minutes after being placed upon the bed, and died while I was adjusting the beam.

WHERE DOES THE LOST SUBSTANCE GO?

"The net results of the experiments con- ducted on human beings is that a loss of sub- stance occurs at death not accounted for by known channels of loss. Is it the soul sub- stance ? It would seem to me to be so. Accord- ing to our hypothesis such a substance is necessary to the assumption of continuing or persisting personality after bodily death, and here we have experimental demonstration that a substance capable of being weighed does leave the human body at death.

"If this substance is a counterpart of the physical body, has the same bulk, occupies the same dimensions in space, then it is a very much

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lighter substance than the atmosphere sur- rounding our earth, which weighs about one and one-fourth ounces per cube foot. This would be a fact of great significance, as such a body- would readily ascend in our atmosphere. The absence of a weighable mass leaving the body at death would of course be no argument against continuing personality, for a space- occupying body or substance might exist not capable of being weighed, such as the ether.

"It has been suggested that the ether might be that substance, but with the modern concep- tion of science that the ether is the primary form of all substance, that all other forms of matter are merely differentiations of the ether having varying densities, then it seems to me that soul substance, which in this life must be linked organically with the body, cannot be identical with the ether. Moreover, the ether is supposed to be non-discontinuous, a continu- ous whole and not capable of existing in sep- arate masses as ether, whereas the one prime requisite for a continuing personality or indi- viduality is the quality of separateness, the ego as separate and distinct from all things else.

"To my mind, therefore, the soul substance cannot be the ether as ether ; but if the theory

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that ether is the primary form of all substance is true, then the soul substance must necessar- ily be a differentiated form of it.

"If it is definitely proven that there is in the human being a loss of substance at death not accounted for by known channels of loss, and that such loss of substance does not occur in the dog, as my experiments would seem to show, then we have here a physiological differ- ence between the human and the canine at least, and probably between the human and all other forms of animal life.

"I am aware that a very large number of experiments would be required before the mat- ter could be proved beyond any possibility of error; but if further and sufficient experimen- tation proves that there is a loss of substance occurring at death and not accounted for by known channels of loss, the establishment of such a truth cannot fail to be of the utmost importance.

"One ounce of fact more or less will have more weight in demonstrating the truth of the reality of continued existence with the neces- sary basis of substance to rest upon than all the hairsplitting theories of theologians and meta- physicians combined.

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"If other experiments by other experiment- ers prove that there is a loss of weight occurring at death, not accounted for by known channels of loss, we must either admit the theory that it is the hypothetical soul substance, or some other explanation of that phenomenon should be forthcoming. If proved true, the materialis- tic conception will have been fully met, and proof of the substantial basis for mind or spirit or soul continuing after the death of the body, insisted upon as necessary by the materialists, will have been furnished.

"It will prove also that the spiritistic concep- tion of the immateriality of the soul is wrong. The postulates of religious creeds have not been a positive and final settlement of the question.

"The theories of all the philosophers and all the philosophies offer no final solution of the problem of continued personality after bodily death. This fact alone of a space-occupying body of measurable weight disappearing at death, if verified, furnishes the substantial basis for persisting personality or a conscious ego surviving the act of bodily death ; and the ele- ment of certainty is worth more than the pos- tulates of all the creeds and all the metaphysical arguments combined."

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VISIBLE DOUBLES OF LIVING PERSONS

In 1903 the school of Nancy in France se- cured ocular evidence of what was defined as "a magnetic body" in the living human body. It really was magnetic in cohesion, and solid enough in favor able, conditions to be repeatedly photographed. By action accordant with every movement of muscle and limb, it showed itself to be a part of the material organism.

A few years later Doctor W. J. Kilner of London succeeded in visualizing this aura, as he called it, by methods of his own devising. The European correspondent of the Laffan news bureau was present at a demonstration made by Doctor Felkin, a colleague of Doctor Kilner.

"The doctor," he wrote, "has made an ap- paratus which consists of a number of what he calls spectauranine glass screens, each about four inches in length and an inch and a half wide. Each screen is made of two plates of very thin glass, between which, hermetically sealed in, is a fluid. The screens vary in color. Some are red, others are blue, varying in depth of color to suit the eyes of the investigator.

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"In a small room was the subject of the ex- periments, a well made woman of medium height and apparently in good health. Doctor Felkin first of all told her exactly the nature of the experiments he was about to make. Then having instructed the observer to look steadily at the daylight through one of the spectauranine screens, and having placed the woman about a foot away from a dead dark background fac- ing the only window in the room, he proceeded to draw a dark blind half way down this window.

"From below he drew up a blind of dark serge until it overlapped the upper blind suf- ficiently to allow light so dim to filter into the room that only the white form of the subject's body could be discerned in the gloom.

" 'Now turn around,' said Doctor Felkin, 'and tell me what you see, or if you see anything at all, for there are perhaps four or five per- sons out of every hundred who through some inherent defect in the eyesight are physically unable to perceive the aura.'

"For perhaps a quarter of a minute the only object that could be made out in the dark was the subject's form and its outline. Then grad- ually, as the eyes grew accustomed to the dark,

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a sort of double mist or halo, the one within the other and the inner one denser than the outer, became more and more distinctly visible,

"The outlines of this mist exactly followed the curves and the contour of the subject's body. The color of the outer aura seemed to be a blue gray, that of the inner aura was darker; also, apparently the inner aura was denser. In the triangular space formed by the sides of the body and the angle of the arms, as the subject remained with her hands resting lightly on her hips, the halo could be seen most clearly.

"Presently, acting upon Doctor Felkin's in- structions, the subject raised and extended first one arm, then the other. Then she joined her hands at the back of her neck. And always the mist of aura followed, as though it were itself an outline of some sort of shadow of the limbs.

"Doctor Felkin's next experiment was to make hypnotic passes in the direction of the patient, first from one side, then from the other, while finally he stood beside her, and raising his arms vertically bent over his hand, allow- ing his partly extended fingers to point down directly to the crown of her head.

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"Every time these passes were made a fine streak of indescribable hue seerfied to shoot out from the tip of each finger straight toward the subject."

The observer naturally wanted to know what practical use could be made of the "discovery/' Doctorlike, the exhibitor explained that "the aura varies in shade, density, breadth and shape, according to the subject's health. An acute and lasting pain such as sciatica is made visible by the length to which the aura of a particular shade and density extends along the limb in which the pain is felt. The aura of a subject suffering from hysteria differs entirely in out- line from that of one suffering from epilepsy."

Dr. Patrick S. O'Donnell of Dublin has im- proved on Doctor Kilner's method of observa- tion and made successful use of the visible etheral aura in diagnosis. Doctor O'Donnell has gone even farther than his English col- league in defining the aura. He has found a fine inner division, conforming precisely with the lines of the body and appearing less affected by health conditions than the other two.

About 1895, Charles W. Leadbeater pub- lished a full description of these aurae, with

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their variability as affected by mentality and moods.

The etheral double is sometimes called the astral shell, and is capable of being independ- ently projected in our field of vision with con- siderable appearance of solidity, especially when the physical body is in suspended anima- tion. (See page 136. )v

As it acts upon the physical body, so is it in turn directed by a finer body of magnetic mat- ter which may be called spiritual, and this third body has conscious intelligence. The two are contained in the physical body as water and sand may at the same time occupy one cup.

We know the total organism has intelligence. We know that in death the physical body has no such thing. It has been found that the body of etheral matter, by itself alone, is similarly lacking. Apprehension, memory, and all the results of living are with the finer body of spir- itual magnetism, and properties of it alone. The ultimate destination of this third or spir- itual body may be largely an inference, but the inference is hard to escape. Doctor Drum- mond, of the University of Montreal, made a rational case for it in his singularly interesting book, "The Ascent of Man."

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The three-fold constitution of a human being is no new concept. It is old as the "problem" of life. If it be not true at least in its conclu- sion, then the whole scheme of creation is a blind ferocity, having no purpose but cruelty, no outcome at all. A chaos not to be thought of, impossible to think of.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE

The steps in the process from our present condition to that in which advanced intelli- gences have their being are traceable with com- parative facility. The way in which they some- times impart to us word of things that are out- side our ability to foresee is explicable.

When a man's physical body dies, his etheral body (it is only a ghost) is set free, and with it for the time being goes the spiritual entity, not yet liberated. The region or condition then entered upon is variously known as purgatory, or limbo, or the valley of the shadow, or the land of shades. After the spiritual entity is finally freed from its integuments, it passes beyond our power to follow with any certainty that could easily be made clear.

The changes may be comparatively abrupt, but the one that occurs with the death of the

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body brings no corresponding abrupt change in the nature or character of the body's late inhabitant. The "twinkling of an eye" change comes not then, but far off in sempiternal space, outside the little circle of this world and its dull dial-light.

PERSISTENT PERSONAL CHARACTER

A scoundrel here is a scoundrel there — a good man is a good man; but the scoundrel lingers longest, and is most free to talk or otherwise display himself according to his nature, when- ever he can. The eidolon of a bad man, actu- ated by a spiritual consciousness in a low stage of development, is dull, and hangs as long as possible around the scene of its fleshly his- tory. It is "earthbound," and eager with a longing to gratify the old appetites and pas- sions, to repossess itself of a fleshly body for that gratification. Hence obsession, an afflic- tion not uncommon, but seldom understood. Hence likewise the grewsome performances in dark seances, and the maunderings of most psychics.

On the other hand, a high individuality stays near us but a little while. It follows a natural tendency and passes onward, and we lose touch

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of it. Such an one has no more wish — or power — to turn back than a full-grown man has to resume the stature and status of a child. The wish to retrogade is in a ratio inverse to the degree of development; the power is absent even if the wish were there, for just as lighter bodies ascend where heavier would either sink or remain stationary, so the finer souls pass on, and in a little while are outside the most remote rim of our perception. But even faith, to which so many of us pin so much, has held out no rational hope that love or longing or anything else can bring them back across that boundary. It is in very truth the bourne from which no traveler returns.

" 0, how far, How far and safe, God, dost thou keep thy saints

When once gone from us! We may cry against The lighted windows of thy fair June heaven, Where all the souls are happy, and not one, Not even my father, look from work or play

To ask, 'who is it that calls after us, Below there, in the dark?'"

How do I know this to be so? I have twice had word from those who were about to pass out of the second remove from earth, into the third ; once, as I have already told, from the wife who had gone out with such tragic suddenness, and

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again from one of the sanest and broadest men of great affairs America in the nineteenth cen- tury produced — I withhold his name for family- reasons only. By both I was informed they were about to go another step beyond and would lose sight of me until my own arrival in that freer state.

SECOND-HAND GHOSTS

In all cases, the deserted body of etheral mat- ter eventually returns to its elements, as the flesh-body does, but sometimes its dissolution is arrested; and then, as one writer says, "it may be taken possession of by a spiritual intelligence other than its original owner, and preserved intact for a considerable time. It may be, and often is, employed as a sort of mask by unscru- pulous intelligences on the spiritual plane, for the purpose of impersonating its original owner to subjective psychics who are unable to con- trol the processes by which they are impressed with subjective clairvoyance."

Besides furnishing inspiration to such psy- chics, these simulacra, original or impersonat- ing, cause all physical manifestations — abso- lutely all save those produced by deliberate jugglery. Impersonation is by no means con-

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fined to "the original owner," but may be what- ever the usurping tenant pleases to make it. Take for instance my experience with the forc- ible liar who said he was Leopold de Meyer,

NO SUMMONS BUN IN SHADOWLAND

It is common with media to pretend to com- ply with a wish that some certain personality be produced. A doubt may be extended now and then, where the medium is imposed upon by a discarnate cheat, as in that case, but their writs have no force in shadowland. They cannot command visits from designated shades, no matter how ready they are to take money for assuming to do it.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

John Braham passed away about 1908. He was one of the best opera conductors we've had, for his love of music was broad and deep, and his own melodic sense was pure. He was brother to Dave Braham, who conducted the orchestra of the old Harrigan and Hart thea- tre in Broadway at Eighth street and created all the songs that arose from that house and floated over the world and have not yet been forgotten. Many of them are in the records used in our music machines, revived by sheer power of beauty or humor or pathos. John himself was during many seasons orchestra director for the Bostonians, the best light opera organization in the long roll of good ones that stands to the credit of our American stage, and many of his songs, too, as well as Dave's, are on the discs. He was an endearing man, sweet minded, warm hearted, a brother to all human kind, selfless and helpful alway. While he held to no formal faith, he was finely attuned and responsive to spiritual thought and the purer ethics. Some of my most happy hours

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were those I had with him and his family at their house on Long Island — usually Sundays.

One afternoon we were talking about phe- nomena that seemed supernormal. He never had bothered with spiritism, chiefly, I think, because his nature and his good breeding shrank from things having any quality of fadism, or that were followed by unpleasant folk. But he could not reconcile himself to a belief that we must perish with the body, since if that could possibly be so much of the best of us would be lost through mere brevity of time ; and farther, that a scheme of life which shut off an equaliza- tion of things unfinished or unbalanced here would be too cruel for any plausible scheme of nature. Toward the last he was inclined to believe in continuity of life beyond this one. He was influenced by an experience.

One summer day in the country, alone in the fields, he was eating a piece of fruit. In a sud- den fit of coughing a piece of it lodged in his throat and strangled him. Blood congested in his head, a maze of colors con- volved before his eyes, his ears were filled with thunderous noise, and in an agony that seemed ages long, he felt himself streaming outward from his head and was lost in an abysmal void.

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Then he was floating up, and looking down upon his body, lying there quietly in the sun- light; and around him were friends, many of them, all known to have died; old friends and dear, who were waving him not to come farther, but go back — go back:

"You have too much to do." "Your time hasn't come yet, John."

He was bewildered, confused. He knew he had not died. But there was his body —

The voices died away, the friendly forms grew dim, and the dark came on again like an enveloping cloud.

The next he knew he was in pain, as if a million needles were being stuck in his body all over, all at once, a prickling torture that grew so intense he cried out. His throat cleared with one spasmodic movement and his eyes opened. He was in the body again, tired, and alone.

ONE WHO DIED AND CAME BACK

In the third volume of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research a case of the same kind is reported in the first person by a man whose name is not given, but whose good faith will not be questioned by anyone who

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knows how earnestly and carefully that Society scans the evidences submitted to it, and satisfies itself concerning the character and standing of witnesses. This witness was a physician. These are the essentials of his story:

"I passed four hours in all without pulse or perceptible heartbeat, as I am informed by Dr. S. H. Raynes, who was the only physician pres- ent. During a portion of this time several of the bystanders thought I was dead, and such a report being carried outside, the village church bell was tolled. Dr. Raynes informs me, how- ever, that by bringing his eyes close to my face he could perceive an occasional short gasp, so very light as to be barely perceptible, and that he was upon the point several times of saying, 'He is dead/ when a gasp would occur in time to check him.

"He thrust a needle deep into the flesh at different points from the feet to the hips, but got no response. Although I was pulseless for four hours, the state of apparent death lasted only about half an hour.

"I lost, I believe, all power of thought or knowledge of existence in absolute unconscious- ness. Of course I need not guess at the time so lost, as in such a state a minute or a thousand

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years would appear the same. I came again into a state of conscious existence, and discov- ered that I was still in the body, but the body and I had no longer any interests in common. I looked in astonishment and joy for the first time upon myself — the me, the real Ego, while the not-me closed it upon all sides like a sep- ulchre of clay.

"With all the interest of a physician I be- held the wonders of my bodily anatomy, inti- mately interwoven with which, even tissue for tissue, was I, the living soul of that dead body. I learned that the epidermis was the outside boundary of the ultimate tissues, so to speak, of the soul. I realized my condition and calmly reasoned thus : I have died, as man terms death, and yet I am as much a man as ever. I am about to get out of the body. I watched the interesting process of the separation of soul and body. By some power, apparently not my own, the Ego was rocked to and fro, laterally, as the cradle is rocked, by which process its connection with the tissues of the body was broken up. After a little time the lateral mo- tion ceased, and along the soles of the feet, beginning at the toes, passing rapidly to the heels, I felt and heard, as it seemed, the snap-

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ping of innumerable small cords. When this was accomplished, I began slowly to retreat from the feet, toward the head, as a rubber cord shortens. I remember reaching the hips and saying to myself, 'Now there is no life be- low the hips.' I can recall no memory of pass- ing through the abdomen and chest, but recol- lect distinctly when my whole self was collected in the head, when I reflected thus : Tam all in the head now, and I shall soon be free.' I passed around the brain as if it were hollow, compress- ing it and its membranes slightly on all sides toward the centre, and peeped out between the sutures of the skull, emerging like the flattened edges of a bag of membranes. I recollect dis- tinctly how I appeared to myself something like a jellyfish as regards color and form. As I emerged, I saw two ladies sitting at my head. I measured the distance between the head of my cot and the knees of the lady opposite the head, and concluded there was room for me to stand, but felt considerable embarrassment as I reflected that I was about to emerge naked before her, but comforted myself with the thought that in all probability she would not see me with her bodily eyes, as I was a spirit. As I emerged from the head I floated up lat-

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erally like a soap-bubble attached to the bowl of a pipe, until I at last broke loose from the body and fell lightly to the floor, where I slowly rose and expanded to the full stature of a man. I seemed to be translucent, of a bluish cast and perfectly naked. With a painful sense of em- barrassment, I fled toward the partially opened door to escape the eyes of the two ladies whom I was facing, as well as others who I knew were about me, but upon reaching the door I found myself clothed, and satisfied upon that point, I turned and faced the company. As I turned, my left elbow came in contact with the arm of one of two gentlemen who were standing in the door. To my surprise, his arm passed through mine without apparent resistance, the several parts closing again without pain, as air reunites. I looked quickly up at his face to see if he had noticed the contact, but he gave me no sign — only stood and gazed toward the couch I had just left. I directed my gaze in the direction of his, and saw my dead body.

"Suddenly I discovered that I was looking at the straight seam down the back of my coat. 'How is this,' I thought, 'how do I see my back?' and I looked again, to reassure myself, down the back of the coat, or down the back of

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my legs to the very heels. I put my hand to my face and felt for my eyes. They were where they should be. I thought, 'Am I like an owl that I can turn my head half-way round?5 I tried the experiment and failed.

"No. Then it must be that having been out of the body but a few moments, I have yet the power to use the eyes of the body, and I turned about and looked back at the open door, where I could see the head of my body in a line with me. I discovered then a small cord, like a spider's web, running from my shoulders back to my body and attaching to it at the base of the neck, in front.

"I was satisfied with the conclusion that by means of that cord I was using the eyes of my body, and turning, walked down the street.

"A small, densely black cloud appeared in front of me and advanced toward my face. I knew that I was to be stopped. I felt the power to move or to think leaving me. My hands fell powerless to my side, my shoulders and my head dropped forward, the cloud touched my face, and I knew no more.

"Without previous thought and without ef- fort on my part, my eyes opened. I looked at

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my hands and then at the little white cot upon which I was lying, and realizing that I was in the body, in astonishment and disappointment I exclaimed : 'What in the world has happened tome? Must I die again?' . . . "

OUIJA

Doctor Macgowan, a missionary to China, writing in the North China Herald in 1843, described a contrivance in use from immemorial time by the people there:

"A table is sprinkled equally with bran, flour, dust or other powder; and two mediums sit down at opposite sides with their hands on the table. A hemispherical basket, eight inches in diameter, is now reversed, and laid down with its edges resting on the tips of one or two fin- gers of the two mediums. This basket is to act as a penholder ; and a reed or stylus is fastened to the rim, or a chopstick thrust through the interstices, with the point touching the pow- dered table.

"A ghost meanwhile has been properly in- voked ; and the spectators stand around, await- ing the result. This is not uniform. Sometimes the spirit summoned is unable to write, some- times he is mischievously inclined, and the pen — for it always moves — will make either a few

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senseless flourishes on the table, or fashion sen- tences that are without meaning, or with a meaning that only misleads. This, however, is comparatively rare. In general the words traced are arranged in the best form of com- position, and they communicate intelligence wholly unknown to the operators. These oper- ators are said to be not only unconscious, but unwilling, participants in the feat."

Doctor Macgowan says that in Nangpo, where he was stationed, there were very few houses in which this mode of getting messages from spirits was not practiced.

In 1868, shortly after an older great war had given a stimulus to spiritual inquiry quite like that which followed the German war of 1914, there came into popular use an instrument of communication called "Planchette." In all es- sentials it was like the device described by Doc- tor Macgowan, and was the same thing at present known as the ouija board. In good usage, "weeya." In the vernacular, "weejee."

Epes Sargent, a well known writer then in active production, gave the name to a book deal- ing with spiritism and the history thereof, an interesting work, still extant. In his first phapter, he describes it;

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"The planchette is a little heartshaped table with three legs, one of which is a pointed lead- pencil, that can be slipped in and out of a socket, and by means of which marks can be made on paper. The other two legs have casters attached, which can be easily moved in any direction. This table is usually about seven inches long and five wide. At the apex of the heart is the socket, lined with rubber, through which the pencil is thrust. The instrument is light, so that the slighest application of force will move it."

When "spirit rapping" began to be investi- gated, a common practice was to call the alpha- bet and note down the letters at which the raps were given. Then someone suggested arrang- ing a pencil at the foot of a light table and plac- ing a sheet of paper under it, that the operating force might produce written sentences.

The device was successful. If set in motion by a passive medium it would trace characters, words, and sometimes sentences. The methods were gradually simplified by placing light, small tables on the ordinary table top; then pasteboard boxes ; and finally the flat piece of wood running on small wheels and called plan- chette. Sargent tells what it would do :

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"Place it on the smooth wood of a table, and let one person, or two or more, of a particular organization, rest the fingers on it lightly, and it will soon begin to move ; and this without any conscious intent or action on the part of any individual present.

"Then, by placing a sheet of white paper under the pencil, it will be found that intel- ligible sentences will be written out by these movements.

"There would be nothing curious in all this were it not for the character of these sentences in many instances. Expressions foreign to the mental habits of the operators will be found on the paper. Thus, the pious will be made to write profanely; and the profane will be sud- denly made instrumental in the production of messages which might do credit to Madame Guyot or to Vincent de Paul. But the results are as various as the idiosyncracies of the oper- ators or mediums. Frequently answers to men- tal questions will be given with a directness that leaves no doubt as to the intelligence of the influence at work.

"It must not be supposed that the 'little plank* will be equally communicative under the fingers of all. In the majority of cases it

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refuses to move. The failures are very numer- ous. Possibly not more than ten out of a hun- dred persons in a mixed assemblage would be found, through whom the phenomena would take place; and in these hundred there might possibly be one who would prove a good medium. Such a one will soon discard the planchette as of no use in the production of phenomena far more extraordinary than any got by its aid.

"Why cannot one person cause it to move as well as another? Why does it sometimes utterly and ignominiously fail when those are present who have the strongest desire to witness its movements, and when those who are sup- posed to influence its movements share in this desire ? The attempt or design to carefully and methodically investigate and study the phe- nomenon appears to arrest it. In some fam- ilies a lady, or a child even, stands in such relation to the instrument as to cause it to move by passing it at a considerable distance. It seems full of impatience to work when such persons are in the house ; and it will write, leap, and run about as if impelled by irresistible impulse. It has occurred when such a family has invited one or more ladies or gentlemen to

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an investigation of its performances, and they have come, that the results have been frivolous and unsatisfactory. A calm, philosophical, careful man is not likely to become convinced of the reality of this class of phenomena from such exhibitions."

An explanation of these things as common then as "mind reading" is for clairvoyance now was that they were "due to animal magnetism."

"Of course," wrote Doctor Nichols, editor of the Boston Journal of Chemistry, "such dec- larations must come from the unlearned or unscientific, as science recognizes no such force or principle in nature as animal magnetism. It is very convenient to have a term to apply in explanation among the crowd, although it may be entirely unmeaning and empirical. Electricity offers no explanation ; neither does magnetism, as at present understood. Chem- ical laws and principles are appealed to in vain for a solution, and as regards 'odic' force, we have not the slightest knowledge of what it is."

It is almost disconcerting now to look back upon the extent, the savagery, of the dispute that raged over and around the antics of this

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spiritistic cut-up. Learned men and great newspapers grew hot, became impolite, rolled each other with scandalous disregard of the amenities. Science would none of it. Believers were militant. Out of the ruckus came this much good:

A tendency developed among the grave and reverend to treat the phenomena as evidence, in their kind, of the presence of an influence not commonly recognized in superior circles, yet worthy of attention as possibly leading to- ward a domain of knowledge new at least to the science of the age. Doctor Nichols wrote candidly that "thousands, from the strange and unusual character of the phenomena, have been driven to a belief in their supernatural origin, and the unfortunate delusion has spread throughout the civilized world. We incline to think exaggerated views are entertained re- specting the competency of scientific men to shed light upon the subject. The key to the mystery must be f ound before any reliable solu- tion is reached . . . Enough has been observed to lead to the conclusion that there is one power, impulse, or force, in nature, regarding the char- acter of which mankind are totally in the dark.

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. . . If the phenomena are ever explained, they will be found to be due to a blending of the psychological and physical endowments of the human organization, acting under certain laws entirely dissimilar to any now known or under- stood."

Such a blending has at times been disclosed since Doctor Nichols' day, but the phenomena then under observation have sunken to insig- nificance— as phenomena — because the plan- chette or ouija cannot command the serious attention of any mind of more than fourth rate inferior quality. It belongs in what might be called the rough house of spiritism, with all other pieces of furniture that are used for sim- ilar or related purposes. Excarnates of low degree and slow progression find amusement in fooling credulous incarnates of or even a little better than their own kind, by means of it. But it is hard to imagine a developed intelligence, excarnate and drawing away from material levels, turning back for no better purpose than to shove a shingle around a table to amuse or instruct a group of perfect strangers, or even a lone individual now and then who would be looking for light in other, more promising ways

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if his or her desires were above the level of mere curiosity. That is the reason why ouija board communications are usually so like the bar room badinage of those dear damp days which now, thanks be, are gone beyond recall.

Of course there are in the next stage intel- lectual oddities of the variety known here as nuts, and these though respectable may not be above crowding in with any sort of wobblies for a chance to edge along a few words now and then. But one of us mortals seeking light with a ouija board might about as well take a dark lantern to a coal hole in the middle of a moon- less night looking for a black cat that is not there, for all he is like to get.

MANIFESTATIONS

Under this designation may be grouped all those phenomena which appear to upset natural law. They seem to be effects proceeding from hidden causes ; and invariably they operate upon material objects or substances.

When they occur in the presence or through the agency of a "sensitive" or of a skilled jug- gler they may be dismissed on suspicion. When they come of themselves they are sufficiently puzzling to be put in the phenomenal class — at least on probation.

The value underlying the story here immedi- ately following lies in the character and stand- ing of the people involved. It appeared first in a book written by the Rev. Charles Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and of Henry Ward Beecher. It was written to Doctor Beecher by Prof. Austin Phelps, D.D., of Andover Col- lege. The group thus named made a deep impression on the mind of America in the nine- teenth century. It was the most powerful

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single influence in directing the thought of the north toward those events that brought on the civil war, swept away slavery, recreated the nation, and made possible the almost miracu- lous development that has given us dominance in the world. The names are part of our his- tory.

Professor Phelps' letter is given in full:

"The circumstances to which you refer took place when I was just commencing at Andover, and at a time when I was much pressed with official duties. They covered a period of seven months.

"My father was residing in Stratford, Con- necticut, with his second wife, who also had several children by a former husband. She was at the time in ill health from the first ap- proaches of the malady (which we did not understand at the time) by which she was sub- sequently bereft of reason.

"My father had paid little attention to such matters previous to his coming to Stratford, except that he had tried to mesmerize my brother, who suffered from heart disease, and had afforded him some relief. The phenomena of spirit rapping he had only noticed as items

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of news in the papers of the day. The greater part of the strange occurrences did not come under my own observation, but were narrated to me by him, in whose testimony I confide as much as in my own. I cannot pretend to give dates, or the precise order of events, but some of the main facts as they occur to my recol- lection.

"The first thing that took place of an un- usual nature was on a certain Sunday. The family, including the servants, according to custom, had been to church, leaving the house locked up. On returning they found the front door wide open. The first thought was that robbers had been there. No signs, however, of their presence appeared, on searching the rooms, until they came to my father's room, and there they found three full suits of his clothes stuffed out with old clothes, etc., and laid out side by side upon the floor, with boots, hat, etc., like a row of corpses, somewhat as I have seen them after a railroad collision. This seemed very strange; but the general impres- sion was that it might be a roguish trick of the boys, or of someone unknown.

"In the course of the day, as my father was walking across the parlor, no other person be-

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ing in the room, a key was thrown from behind over his head, and fell on the floor at his feet. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. Soon after a nail was thrown in the same way. In the evening, as the family was sitting together, suddenly a turnip fell from the ceiling in their midst. Then they began to hear little raps in various directions. They tried to trace them up, but could not.

"Things went on for some time. Noises were heard in different parts of the house. At the dinner table, spoons would fly up out of the vessel and fall upon the table. The forks would do the same. Once my father took the spoons, and the servant put them in the closet and locked the door, and brought him the key. In the space of ten minutes the spoons were back on the table again, without any visible agency. Father then took them himself, put them in the closet and locked the door, and in ten min- utes, without seeing them come, they were on the table again. He unlocked the door; they were not there.

"Meanwhile the knockings, etc., continued day and night, and many of the neighbors hear- ing what was going on, began to come in to see

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and hear. As a specimen, a thing like this took place :

"One day at dinner a package of six or eight silver spoons were all at once taken and doubled up — bent double by no visible agency. My father had placed them in the closet, locked the door, and kept the key himself. A sister of his was there at the time on a visit, and a neighbor came in inquiring about what she had heard. The sister got the key, went to get the spoons, unlocked the door, and there lay the spoons as straight as before, with no dent, or crease, or sign of having been bent. This is only a specimen. There were dozens of such events.

"Of course there was much excitement and talk, and all sorts of opinions were expressed. Many most unjustly attributed it to my father's wife or her children. It was known that she did not like Stratford, and was desir- ous of moving to Philadelphia. It was also noticed that the phenomena were in some way connected with her and her children, rather than with my father and his children. In mod- ern parlance, they were the mediums.

"She was a Christian woman, a member of the Episcopal church, and much grieved at the

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charge, and denied it in the most, solemn man- ner. Indeed the whole visitation was made a subject of daily prayer in the family. And all cognizant with the facts are perfectly certain that neither she nor her children were con- sciously implicated. If they were mediums it was by no wish or will of their own. It was more like a case of possession.

"For example, one of the most startling oc- currences was this : One day my father heard one of the children crying, out in the yard (it was the boy whose presence had been most fol- lowed by the knockings, etc.). The boy was found up in an apple tree, tied fast with a rope, in a situation where it seemed impossible he could have gotten by himself, or by any human agency.

"For some time after these things com- menced, even after the idea of communicating by the alphabet had occurred to him, my father resolved to have nothing to do with it. But at length he became weary, and resolved to try. Pursuing the usual course, as he had seen it described, he met with a ready affirmative re- sponse (three raps) , and wrote down intelligent sentences.

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"The first question of course was 'Who are you?' To this various answers were given, sometimes one name, sometimes another, all of parties deceased, but most frequently came the name of a brother of Mrs. Phelps. The next inquiry was as to his object, or what was the matter with him.

"His answer was in substance: 1. That he was in hell. 2. That Mrs. Phelps had been cheated in the settlement of an estate by a per- son named D'S — . My father not recognizing the name, which was French, asked his wife if she knew such a person. She said no, and asked how the name was spelled. He spelled it, and she said:

' 'Oh, you pronounced it wrong. It was D'S — ,' giving the correct pronunciation; and she remembered there was such a person— a head clerk in a firm that had been in some way concerned in the settlement.

"My father went to Philadelphia and made an investigation of the facts. He found evi- dence sufficient to confirm the suspicion of fraud excited by the communications, but noth- ing sufficient to convict in a court of justice; nothing, in short, resulting in rectifying the settlement.

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"On one occasion my father was sitting in a small anteroom, about five feet square, at a little desk where he kept his accounts. He was alone. An incessant rapping being kept up, he at length said :

"'What do you want r

"And on using the alphabet the answer was spelled out:

" 'Put your hand under the table.'

"He did so, and his hand was grasped by a human hand, warm and soft like mine.

"At my father's request, I yyent to Stratford to see and examine into the case. I went with strong prepossessions, having heard what was said about my stepmother, — that it was in some way contrived by her and her children. I was soon entirely undeceived, and convinced that I had been unjust to her, and that she and her children were entirely innocent of any com- plicity.

"The phenomena that I witnessed were not so striking as some my father told me of. I was accompanied by a brother of my father, Doctor Phelps, who was far from being credulous or visionary — in fact tending rather to materialism than to belief in the super- natural.

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"We occupied the same room, and slept soundly until midnight, when we were awak- ened by what seemed like a deep sigh breathed through the keyhole, and repeated several times quite loudly. Then there was a tremendous hammering outside our door, in the hall. We got up, struck a light, went into the next room, where father slept, and asked him what the noise was. He answered:

'You know as well as I do; judge for your- selves.'

"We went and examined, and found on the banister marks and dents, as if it had been beaten with a hard substance. We went up- stairs and found the servants' doors locked, all the children asleep, and no evidence whatever to connect the noise with any of them.

"The noise continued at intervals till morn- ing. The next day we searched the house thoroughly, and found nothing except that in the attic was a suit of father's clothes stuffed as before described, and stretched out on the floor.

"The next night the noises were still more abundant. 'Let us follow the noise,' I said. 'I will go inside the door, you outside.'

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"We followed till we came to the apartment of the oldest daughter. It was in the evening, about nine o'clock. With her permission I stepped inside the room, and the doctor staid outside. The knocking came on the door be- tween us.

"Said I, 'Doctor, the knocking is on the out- side of the door.'

No,' said he, 'it is on the inside/ The young lady was in bed, covered up, and out of reach of the door. We examined the panel, and found dents where it had been struck. Just then, as I stepped back into the room, a hairbrush was thrown, apparently from the door, and fell at my feet. It was a most inexplicable thing.

"I omitted to say that a serious feature of the business was the burning of my father's barn in broad daylight, when no person was- in the building or near it, so far as known.

"One thing I saw, bearing on that matter, in the course of our investigations: One of the children slept in a cot bed in my father's room, and one evening we saw a smoke rising from that bed. We turned up the bed clothes, lifted up the mattress, and found underneath a news- paper ignited, which blazed up.

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"The general character of the responses was rather low. Many of them were simply ridicul- ous. For instance: When the alleged spirit seemed to be in an unhappy state, we asked :

Can we do anything for you?' 'Answer, 'No/

What do you want? What would you like?'

'Answer, 'a piece of pumpkin pie/ Many communications came just as ridicul- ous. Throughout the whole thing there was nothing of any importance — -no religious truth. He said, indeed, he was in hell, but the idea seemed to be he would get out hereafter; there was a general notion of progress, and all would come out right — some time; there was a good deal of truth in the Bible, but a good deal of nonsense, too ; and he seemed, to use a common expression, to be specially down on St. Paul.

"The idea of Atonement seemed to be specially distasteful, even repulsive. Christ, they seemed to think, was much the same as other men. There were, however, some that professed to be good spirits, who said they were there to keep the bad ones in order. But on the whole the development of

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thought was characterized by a consummate pettiness. There was no object worthy of reve- lation.

"In the retrospect, my father subsequently said, his religious convictions were not at all affected; he still held to the faith of his child- hood, with the exception that his views of scrip- tural demonology were more distinct; and his belief strengthened that spirits, good and bad, do have access to us, and that they are in con- flict.

"For my own part, I could not account for what I saw, and heard from reliable witnesses, on any other theory but that of spirits, though I never have gone quite so far as to admit that any of those concerned were good spirits.

"That deceitful spirits can assume to be good is plain. And the most probable hypothesis, until science can prove something else, is that such was the fact here."

TELEPATHY

Late in 1875 there appeared from out the wheatfields of Iowa a bland young man named somethingor other Brown, a plump and pleasing person, viridically embodying innocence. He was steered and spoken for by a local lawyer named Robinson, who knew me and none other newspaper man. Mr. Robinson said Mr. Brown could tell what any other fellow hap- pened to be thinking about. "He is a mind reader," said Robinson, and offered to make him demonstrate.

I was a good enough poker player to know that there were plenty of fellows infesting the town who could read the minds of other fellows and get money thereby. I am not ready to deny that I myself had acquired various sums in the little friendly games we used to have, by reading the other fellows' minds through their faces. Therefore this mind reading thing did not excite me. But Robinson said enough to indicate a story, and I sent him to the city

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editor. Next morning we played up Brown in a mixture of odic force, magnetism, and a few other ingredients that nobody could under- stand.

The city editor had turned Brown and his pilot over to Jim Chisholm, a whimsical soul with a perception of character, a quaint humor, and no illusions. Jim worked upon Paul's advice to prove all things and hold fast that which is good. He had given the evening to Brown and Robinson, had found Robinson was out for free publicity, and had shoved him over the side and attached himself to Brown whom he found incapable of reading much of any- thing, minds least of all, but who had shown him a trick that was new and perhaps not vain. Brown could find anything you might hide, and do it blindfolded, though kept out of the room or even the house while the article was selected and the hiding done.

The story Jim wrote made quite a stir. Rob- inson was quick to grab the chance. He got on the blind side of the Union Park Congrega- tional Church people, made a deposit of hire for the use of their preach-hall, and advertised a mind-reading show. Jim stuck by the job and did it well. Incidentally he was cultivated by

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Robinson with sinister intent, and taken into confidence, consenting to be "a plant" under Robinson's entreaty to help out with an audi- ence that might rattle honest young Brown by its size and possibly its incredulity. He wanted to pull off at least one sure-fire test.

MIND BEADING BY AGREEMENT

The show was a startling success. Brown seemed able to find anything, either by going straight to where it was hidden, or by saying where and what it was.

Jim's personal case was the big feature. He lived nearby and nearly everyone knew him. His agreed article was a gold-bodied pencil, in an upper pocket of his vest. When Brown described and located it, and Jim stood up and admitted both, there was what the other papers called a Profound Sensation. All Brown (through Robinson) had required in this and other tests was that the testee keep his mind on the object and its place. Jim was fair, how- ever, and admitted to me that many if not most of the finding was genuine, even though his own were previously determined. Brown, he said, had some undiscovered power up his sleeve.

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During the afternoon friend Robinson turned up with a black eye. A regular show- man had seen in Brown a chance to make big money, and in manual combat had won him from Robinson, who had no contract but stood upon his rights under the law of discovery. In- stead of having the showman impounded upon a charge of assault, he had flown to apathetic newspaper offices with the saga of his wrongs. Robinson had ceased to be news, save for his black eye, which drew a few merry quips. The showman meanwhile was on his way to New York, escorting Brown.

THE CAPTURE OF NEW YORK

Brown had New York interested from the start. "Mind reading" got the front page on its merits or demerits, and everybody went chasing after it.

Of course, stage magicians had been doing pretty much the same thing in their own dear little artful way for years and years and years, but all their work was within tight boundaries, whereas Brown's was in the open and undoubt- edly what it professed to be. Schopenheauer had conceded such gifts and (grudgingly enough) a good deal more, as far back as 1850 ;

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but Schopenheauer had addressed the intelli- gentzia, whereas Brown went over to they that gape and rub the elbow at any opaque innova- tion— the multitudinous unmeritable many.

Here was the beginning of mind reading, called Telepathy by scientists when they began to look into though not through it. I do not recall what became of Brown. He dropped out of sight, because others came along who knew not Iowa, neither Robinson; nor black- ened eyes. The first and second of these trailers were Bishop and Cumberland.

THE SAD CASE OF BISHOP

Brown had not always required physical contact with a subject whose mind he was read- ing. As I look back to it, he seems to me to have had a slight touch of clairvoyance. Bishop had clairvoyance in greater degree, but not much of it at that. I knew him well and liked him much. He had a keen mind, an open man- ner, and he was straight. He was subject to seizures of coma, quite like catalepsy ; or rather suspended animation, for his heart would stop beating. Physicians puzzled over him. His managers played up to their curiosity, and this erroneous exploitation cost him his life.

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In one of his seizures they sawed off the top of his skull and took out his brain to see what it was made of and what made its wheels go round. They were disconcerted to find it quite normal, which put the j oke on them ; but Bishop himself would appear to have been annoyed, for he never came out of it.

When the undertaker supervened, he found in one of the pockets a note written by Bishop asking that if he were found apparently dead he be not disturbed — that he would "come to" without fail and without medical aid. His mother was aware of this, but unhappily she was not there at the time. She sued the doc- tors, but somehow they squirmed from under. Nothing was done about it.

MUSCLE READERS

Bishop and Cumberland required contact with their subjects. They were expert in de- tecting muscular movements, even the slightest, that would tell them whether they were going toward or away from a hidden or a thought-of thing or place. In fact they were muscle readers. But they did enough that looked mys- terious to attract investigation by the Society for Psychical Research, which was then in an

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early stage of its career ; and the Society after a fair examination arrived at the truth and ex- ploded the whole show so far as concerned its earlier claim of supernormality.

Since then "thought transference" has reached out on one hand for rational explana- tion, and on the other has comfortably settled down as a "parlor" (what a word!) amusement at evening gatherings of the genteel select. In this latter application it is not half bad.

DO YOUR OWN MIND EEADING

In a group of say a dozen people, one is blindfolded, and may be sent from the room. The other eleven, preferably though not neces- sarily sitting in the dark, agree upon an object, and "concentrate" thought upon it. Then the blindfold subject is brought in. Nothing is said; but if the concentration is real and the subject holds his own mind quiescent, he will find himself impelled to move in one or another direction. The chances are he will fumble about for a few moments, then go straight to the object, and lay hands upon it. Then every- body will say "Ah !" And that's all.

All, but enough — and more than any inves- tigator has yet been able to clear up, for

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telepathy as such has firmly repudiated any- thing that might be called spiritistic, as well as anything in the nature of intelligence trans- mitted through etheral contact. It admits Suggestion, but offers nothing that would dis- close the method by which Suggestion operates toward results obtained.

WHAT IS TELEPATHY?

The late James H. Hyslop treated the matter at large and with nearest approach to clarity, but left it where he found it. Mr. Hyslop was a Ph. D., an LL. D., and Secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research — an open-minded, earnest seeker after such truth as his lights enabled him to find on the hither side of sanity. His book on "Psychical Research and Survival" says "there is no scientific ground for using either vibrations or wireless analogies for making telepathy intelligible, whether direct or indirect. It may be that such processes are facts. I do not know, and science has produced no evidence for the fact. The term telepathy thus remains only as a name for facts and is not an explanation."

In an article written for and appearing in The North American Review the same author

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says "the spiritistic theory, in so far as it is Dased on phenomena of personal identity, is> practically intelligible and appeals to web known laws of nature. Telepathy is an appear to the unknown and thus violates the first con dition of a scientific explanation. We do not know any process whatever in connection with the phenomena of telepathy and so can not use it for scientific explanations. It is quite other- wise with the spiritistic theory where the facts illustrate personal identity.

"In the first place, we explain the actions of a living person by the action of consciousness on the organism. In conversation with a man, we interpret his vocal statements, not as blind, unconscious and mechanical actions, but as evi- dence of associated intelligence. Wherever the evidence is sufficient, we infer intelligence in connection with certain facts.

"Now, that particular person with whom we were conversing dies and his body dissolves. No more actions occur in connection with his bodily organism from which I can infer the continuance of that consciousness. But sup- pose that I go to another living organism whose consciousness never knew the facts about my friend, and the incidents of his last conversation

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are all detailed over again to me, why should I not suppose or infer that the same conscious- ness is instigating them that I would infer with the living organism? On the other hand, the proved fact of telepathy, whatever the process, would make this possible, assuming that con- sciousness actually did survive and only awaited favorable conditions for communication, and we might legitimately suppose that the facts were evidence of the survival, without any ap- peal to a process to account for them or to make them intelligible.

"When we say 'spirit' in such a situation we do not mean a quasi-material form, as usually imagined, but we mean the continuance of the consciousness or stream of consciousness which we once knew, and now infer, to explain certain movements and actions of a given organism. We are not setting up an unknown process, such as telepathy is. We are inferring the same mental states that we knew operative at a former time, and, if in the living it be the nature or the capacity of consciousness to cause move- ments or sensory pictures in the mind, why may not the same power be active after death; and when a suitable organism or set of condi- tions is found in the living, why may not the

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same consciousness produce the same effects? In both the conception of the process and the appeal to telepathy is to the wholly unknown using the known to explain the facts. The appeal to persistence of consciousness we are as a process. The facts are nothing but mental states and as such are not special types of phenomena of a special type different in nature absence of normal stimuli that is striking.

"The consequence is that we shall not be in any position to understand telepathic coinci- dences until we ascertain the special process by which they are produced. If telepathically induced mental states represented individual phenomena individually considered. It is the from ordinary mental states, the discovery of a special process would not be so important Ajiy other associated event or agent might juffice to explain it. But telepathy is but a name for a coincidence between phenomena which, individually and in normal conditions, are perfectly familiar, and it is the coincidence that is unusual, not the mental state. Conse- quently we must know what the process is that establishes the coincidence, to understand it.

"But it is precisely this process that is totally unknown. So far as we know, the process

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might be the action of spirits as messengers for carrying the thoughts of one living person to another. We have no evidence that any such thing occurs, and it would involve a complicated process to effect it in this way. The habit of science is to take the direct course for explana- tion instead of the indirect, unless the evidence points to the indirect one. Hence, I do not refer to the possibility of spirit agency in telepathy as if it were a fact, but only to exhibit our ignorance of the real process, and it is that ignorance which forbids the use of 'telepathy' to explain anything whatever. It remains a name for facts which still seek an explanation.

"Let us then summarize the state of telepathy as an hypothesis :

"1. It is nothing but a name for facts, for mental coincidences, excluding chance, guess- ing, and normal sense perception.

"2. It is not a casual explanation of anything whatever, even of mental coincidences. We know nothing about the process involved, whether 'brain waves,' etheral undulations, or other conditions exist to make transmission pos- sible ; and even if they did exist the case would not be any more intelligible.

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"3. We do not know whether the process of transmission is direct between the living or in- volves some third agent to carry the message. Our knowledge is so limited in the matter that this hypothesis is as good as any to account for the facts.

"4. The only telepathy for which we have any scientific evidence whatever is connected with the present active mental states of the sup- posed agent and those of the percipient. There is no scientific evidence that it is primarily or exclusively a subconscious affair initiated and carried out by the percipient. The evidence connects it with the apparent stimulus of the agent's thought.

"5. The telepathy which assumes that the percipient selects desired information from the subconsciousness of a person present has no evi- dence whatever, scientific or otherwise, for itself. Yet this has been assumed in order to eliminate other hypotheses.

"6. The still further extended telepathy which assumes that a percipient can at any time gain access by subconscious action to the sub- consciousness of any person at a distance, or of all living persons, and select what is necessary for its purpose, has absolutely no evidence,

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scientific or otherwise, for its assumed action. It has nothing but the imagination of people who have no scientific knowledge to support it. It will be conceivable when it produces at least an iota of evidence in its favor."

Mr. Hyslop left the matter thus, having gone as far toward an understanding of it as anyone yet has been able to go. It might as well be added as a fourth to the three things that Solomon gave up as being too much for him. Or handed over to the fourth dimension.

TELEPATHY AND HYPNOSIS

TK, author of that strange work, "The Har- monic Series" (Indo- American Book Com- pany, Chicago, 1913. Florence Huntley, edi- tor), in treating of the Physiology of Hyp- nosis, says everyone who is at all familiar with the processes of telepathy will understand how it is possible to convey an exact impression, or thought, or impulse of the will, to the conscious- ness of another, quite independently of the physical senses, but that independent telepathy must not be confused with the hypnotic proc- ess, for it is no more related to hypnotism than it is to the ordinary process of telepathy. He proceeds :

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"It should be remembered that an impulse of the mind formulated in a thought is a wholly different thing from the words in which that thought is clothed. It requires the spoken words to convey an exact thought from one mind to another through the instrumentality of the physical auditory nerve. In like man- ner, it requires the printed letters and words to convey the thought of a writer to the mind of his reader through the agency of the physical optic nerve. Although words are necessary in both instances, nevertheless the words them- selves do not constitute the thought in either case. They do not even constitute any part of the thought.

"In the first instance they are merely a com- bination of physical sounds so arranged and modulated as to convey to the listener's con- sciousness through his physical sense of hearing the thought in the mind of the speaker. In the other way they are only a set of physical signs so arranged as to convey the same thought from one mind to another through the physical sense of sight. In both cases they are simply used as instruments or vehicles for carrying thoughts from one intelligence to another.

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"Moreover, it is a scientific fact which anyone may demonstrate in course of time, under proper instruction, that the impulse of the human soul formulated into a definite thought, is a force. This force, under proper conditions, may be impressed upon the consciousness of another intelligent soul without the aid of words either spoken, written or printed. This may be done without the use of any physical sensory organs at all. It may be accomplished through spiritual agencies exclusively. And the chan- nels through which this may be accomplished are spiritual sensory organs in both number and character, except that they operate upon a higher plane of refinement and vibratory ac- tivity."

MATERIALIZATION SEANCES

There is no other phase of manifestation so pliable to abuse, so abounding in deliberate im- posture, as that which is encountered in mate- rializing seances where the cabinet is employed. The author of The Harmonic Series treats of it in a manner at once so compact and so clear that I prefer compressing his category to formulating a statement of my own.

In describing the method or operations of materialization it is common to speak of "gen- erating" the magnetism by which the stuff or material of an apparition coheres and is made plastic. The term is erroneous, since nothing is generated, but everything is accumulated or assembled. Therefore in what here follows I have used the word "accumulated" to keep the description within the facts.

Our Harmonic author admits or assumes genuine spirit direction in these phenomena. He says the intelligences who understand and direct the processes first throw the medium

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into a state of profound trance, and then em- ploy "the vital and spiritual organisms," in con- junction with outside elemental conditions, to produce visible forms. The processional order he states in this order:

(a) Every living, human physical organism is a natural accumulation of animal magnetism and vital energy. In this respect it is closely analagous in action to an electric dynamo.

(b) During the physically negative or passive hours of sleep, this human dynamo is constantly engaged in accumulating magnetism and vital energy with which to propel the machinery of the physical body during the wak- ing hours. The moment an individual wakens from sleep he begins to draw upon this accumu- lated supply, and continues to do so until sleep once more locks the doors of the storehouse and prevents further escape.

(c) Under proper conditions animal mag- netism is faintly visible to the physical eye. This may be demonstrated by anyone who will observe the following suggestions:

* Arrange a perfectly black background.

* See elsewhere in this book the New York Sun account of Poctor Felkin's experiments.

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Then, in the twilight of evening, have a strong, healthy man take a position four to six feet in front of this background. Take a position yourself at a distance of twenty to forty feet, so that his form will be outlined against the dark background. Now let your eyes rest steadily upon his form a few moments, while your at- tention is directed to its delineation against the background. In a short time you will begin to see a faint radiation of light surrounding the form. The longer you look the more distinct it will become until the form will appear to be almost illuminated. "This is animal mag- netism and vital energy and is constantly ex- pended in this manner by the physical body during the waking hours of every individual."

(d) It requires but a small amount of at- tenuated physical matter added to this physical magnetism to bring the compound clearly within the range of physical vision.

(c) While the medium is in the deep, leth- argic trance state the physical body is in a nega- tive or passive condition. In this condition it gives off animal magnetism quite freely.

(f ) While the physical body of the medium is thus negative, spiritual forces may be so applied by the intelligences operating the

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process as to draw off its animal magnetism and vital energy as rapidly as they are supplied.

(g) The liberated animal magnetism of a medium may be controlled by the action of the will of one who understands the process by which it is accomplished.

(h) When the medium is in a state of deep trance the "spiritual" controls withdraw from the physical body of the medium all the animal magnetism and vital energy possible. To this they are able to add a sufficient quantity of at- tenuated matter drawn from the surrounding elements to bring the whole compound into view.

A MATERIALIZED BODY

"Spiritual" controls who understand mate- rialization are able to use the medium's physical body as a fashion form, so to say, and to invest it with this materializing substance in such manner as to transform it into representation of many personalities, clothing and all. But this sort of impersonation is sometimes prac- ticed by unscrupulous controls, to the confusion of the medium when (as often happens) unbe- lievers rudely interfere. At its best it is not very nice. At its worst it is repulsive.

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Apparitions thus induced give off a faintly noisome odor. Mr. Perry, of whom I have related that he believed he had seen the ghost of his sister at such a seance, told me it "smelled like a grave," a simile more blunt than apt, for I doubt whether he ever had smelled a grave or was in any way acquainted with fragrances or stenches elaborated there ; and I can bear testi- mony that nothing in the atmosphere of mate- rializing seance rooms could by even the dullest nose be mistaken for spicy waftures from Araby the blest.

The whole business is stuffy, unpleasant, and even when it is genuine, uninstructive. It never gets you anywhere. Its appeal to the bereaved is disturbing because it is so meagre, so tantaliz- ing; to the merely curious or credulous it is dangerous, because it beckons toward quick- sands. Where it is true, it is a bit of dubious value set in a wilderness of deception.

One shrinks from describing the deliberate trickery to which nearly all materializing seances are so widely open, at so little risk to the performers, who play with the most sacred affections, and are without compunction in tearing the heart of a mother, or opening anew the wounds of a widow. Trust the exhib-

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i f

itor for knowing at least two or three of the easiest victims in his audience! He is master of the ceremonies. His functions are much like those of the lookout at a faro table, with this outstanding difference: He frames the game before it is played. The lookout merely watches the play as it goes forward.

Once in Boston I sat near a woman who was outspoken in her anxiety to see again a child of four or thereabout, not long lost. She sat with touching patience while a dismal succession of hand-made spooks dispensed consolation or disappointment to the others. At last, when the master of the ceremonies thought her ripe enough, a voice from the cabinet announced the arrival of a spirit baby who wanted to see her mamma — giving the woman's initials. Was there someone present who owned those initials?

There was — (there always is). The whole force of the poor woman's being went out in that acknowledgment.

Then along the floor, from between the cur- tains, stole a little luminous cloud. About mid- way of the intervening space it stopped, and a whisper came,

"Mamma!"

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"Restrain yourself, madame," spoke the con- trol in the cabinet, a deep, masculine voice — the medium was a woman, a fat woman with two voices, one ridiculously high and thin for one so thick as she, the other barytone. "Restrain yourself. Your child is gathering strength."

The woman got herself in hand, and waited, and the little luminosity grew up from the floor — jerkily — until it was maybe two feet in height, luminous throughout, or rather lambent ; and pulsing.

"Mamma!" in a weak whisper. "Does 00 know me, Mamma?"

With a choking cry the woman stretched out her hands and would have gone to her knees toward the figure. "My baby! O, my baby!"

The figure collapsed on the spot where it seemed to stand and with a quick, whirling movement vanished into the cabinet, leaving a faint trail that shimmered and faded out. The woman pitched over in a dead faint. Someone struck a light, and there was con- fusion.

The master of ceremonies, standing outside the cabinet and near it, hastily drew the cur- tains wide. There sat the medium alone, apparently in a trance.

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w The master of the ceremonies snapped his

fingers before her face and spoke sharply,

" Wake up!"

Slowly the fat old thing opened her eyes, shivered, rubbed them, looked dazed, and asked in that piccolo voice of hers,

"What's the matter ?"

Nothing was the matter. That baby act was what in vaudeville is known as A Chaser. It was intended to terminate the show.

The baby was a mass of floss rubbed with phosphorus, loosely wrapped around one end of a wire. It was shaken out or twisted small with ease, part of a kit of tools, as you might call them, served from and withdrawn behind a nicely hinged baseboard of the wall back of the cabinet. I did not need to look. The con- trivance was old in the cabinet-ghost trade.

Nor did I feel called upon to say anything. But when I was leaving I found opportunity to wink at the master of the ceremonies — bad manners, but I couldn't help it. He winked at me, too, and we smiled at each other the smile of perfect understanding. The brute!

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE'S ATTITUDE

In apparatus and preparation, save for the phosphorus, this seance was much of a kind with those which floated in memory down the years, discredited until they reached and en- veloped the wonder-sense of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who put them on paper and landed them on the editor of The Saturday Evening Post, who innocently passed them along to our Amer- ican public, unknowing their disreputable origin. Those old seances constituted the Katy tKing case, a matter of some forty years ago.

The Katy King case raised a big smoke for quite a while before it blew its own head off and dirtied everyone for miles and miles around, like a mud volcano. It occurred in London. It is an obtruding item in a long catalogue of discouraging farces. Sir Arthur's home is in Sussex, the second county south of Middlesex, where London is.

When I lived in London, not so very far back, the Katy King case was pretty sure to be thrown in my face whenever spiritism came

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under discussion. It is strange a thing so fla- grant could persist so long, and show no signs of wear. It is more strange that with the facts so well known, such old stuff and so near him, it was so readily accepted by one of the ablest, broadest minds among all the English speaking peoples, the most matter-of-fact, unillusioned, sane people that ever lived in the tides of time. I wrote Sir Arthur on the subject, and he an- swered:

"I have not heard of any such exposure — nor had Sir William Crookes.

"My experience is that in many cases the so- called exposures are simply the result of want of knowledge on the part of the exposers as to the actual conditions, transfigurations, posses- sion, &c. This view is borne out by Schrenck Notzing in his research on materialization. Yours faithfully, A. Conan Doyle/''

This case should emphasize the charge of futility that stands against the whole material- izing mess. Nobody ever got any good by it. I'd say that much in wood type ten feet high, or hallo it to the reverberate hills, but I would not argue it. There is no issue.

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What is the use of bothering with cabinet materialization? In itself it conveys no assur- ance of lif e's continuity, no evidence of survival. Such assuring evidence can be had with cer- tainty by no means other than interchange of intelligence between those who have gone and those who remain, where undoubtable identifi- cation is established and the interchange has definite meaning within the bounds of reason, of proof, of common sense. All else is what our Sidney Smith would register as Carp Caviar.

HIGHER ATTRIBUTES OF LOWER

ANIMALS

Anyone who really has known a dog, has had a dog to friend, will hesitate to accept the dicta of Sir Oliver Lodge and Doctor Mae- Dougall that "animals are purely earthly" and "have no hereafter."

No instance of an intelligence at the moment of dissociation from the body projecting itself through space to the mind of a beloved friend is any clearer than the vision Sir Rider Hag- gard* had when his dog was drowning, in the night.

Woven through their deep affection was a mental understanding that made for perfect companionship. The dog was given free range at all hours. He had gone afield one night with a keeper, and by some mischance had fallen into a turbulent little stream so suddenly that he lost his sense of direction and was rolled to death in a stretch of tumbling white water.

*Please pronounce it "Reader," as its owner does.

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To Sir Rider, in bed and asleep a mile away, the whole scene stood out, as though he were there in the body, with a sense of appeal so urgent that he waked and went toward the place. On the way he met the keeper, bringing the body home. He wrote the story, and it ap- peared in (I think it was) one of the Psychical Research publications.

The finest, rarest attribute of soul or spirit is the one we know as altruism; and your dog is your one altruist, ready to fight for you, or without the slightest hesitation die for you. The love of a dog for the human being he has taken to be his master is a perfect, a selfless love. Nothing can annul it. Cruelty nor anything else can turn it aside. He grieves with you, is glad with you, is a calm participant in your content, holds by you as a Christian holds by the God of the Christians.

Of all animals below the human order, he is the only one that has crossed the line to be a friend to man. If all the dogs in all the world were gathered into one great republic of dogs and one man should appear, every dog of them all would quit his republic on the instant, to follow the man.

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Three of the f ourf ooted creatures have made themselves or been made companions in man's domestic life: the dog, the cat and the horse. The cat remains a wild thing. He is with us for what there is in it for himself — warmth and food. The horse would not stay an hour if he knew his own strength. The dog would go to hell with or for you, asking nothing better.

The power of reason is one of our most pre- cious properties, amounting almost to a faculty. Dogs have it, too, sometimes considerably devel- oped. Almost any dog has intelligence high enough to be conscious of itself — to be capable of making him review and judge his own acts in the court of his own mind.

In boyhood I had a dog of mixed derivation, a greedy dog, weak as a human where his appe- tites urged, but ridden by a painful conscience. One summer day I watched him while he de- bated with himself concerning a beautiful, a very beautiful steak, that lay close to the edge of the kitchen table. Finally he looked around with the face and mean eyes of a sneak, to make sure he was alone. He missed me. I was standing still, outside.

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Then he made a movement toward the steak, his forefeet off the floor, and dropped back and made that queer internal modulated whine a dog makes when he wants something awfully and doesn't dare bark ; and danced a little with his forefeet; and then with one desperate rush captured the steak, broke for the open, and ran into me.

Surprise shocked him to a standstill, with the steak in his jaws.

He was a thief, but he was my dog. I took the steak away from him, and told him what I thought of a dog that would steal from even the people he owned ; and while I thus was preach- ing along came Mother, and — I have memories.

I was caught with the goods, apparently on the edge of feeding my wretched pup, in flagrant violation of the ethics, of all the laws of domestic economy. Carlo was cringeing, with one side of his jaw sliding along the ground and on the other side a grin of propitiation, but Mother saw him not.

I took the licking that should have been his. He took asylum under the stable, and there for three days he stuck, nor would come forth, nor eat. I couldn't scare him out. He would lie

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with eyes askant, just beyond reach, a figure of desolation, ashamed and unresponsive.

Toward evening of the third day I ap- proached him with food. He crawled out on his stomach, looking up sidewise with misery in his eyes. But when he ate, at first with hesi- tation, then like a wolf, and found himself full and in no danger of bodily harm, he did a vast romp, and in three minutes barked the barks of three days, scratched earth backward with his hind feet, and forgot the whole tragedy.

That dog could think. He had a mind and a conscience, and these are properties of a soul. Not all the Doctors MacDougall that ever came out of Scotland could make me believe dogs have no souls. They are not of the beasts that perish, if such beasts be — which I doubted even before I had read Sir John Lubbock, or Maet- terlinck on "The Bee," or Fabre's "Life of the Spider."

Fortune once favored me with a smoke-room companion in a west bound Union Pacific train. He was a middle aged man who took himself seriously, a Professor of Psychology in a Pacific coast "college," and he came out strong on the psychology of dogs, concerning which he held a low opinion, backed by instances.

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One of these instances was a demonstration of stupidity by a young collie that had been commended because of its reputation for alert mentality. A spurious reputation he found it to be, for not even the most elementary tests drew more than earnest attention and futile efforts to understand.

This was the simplest one: Observing or having been informed that dogs were fond of playing ball, he procured a hollow ball of India rubber. Holding the ball close to but clearly before the dog, he explained at length, in words of one and two syllables, that he was going to throw it a certain distance across certain ob- stacles, and desired the dog to travel around those obstacles on reverse curves, and retrieve it. This being made clear, he asked the dog:

"Do you understand?"

To which the dog without hesitation re- sponded "Woof!" which is dogese for "Yes, sir."

The ball was thrown precisely as he had in- formed the dog it would be. But instead of following the curves as instructed, the stupid creature went over the obstacles, picked up the ball, brought it back, and wanted to play some

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more. No psychology. Nobody home between that witless dog's two ears.

It would have been of no use to short-fuse the professor's conclusion and hand it back to blow him up. Of the two, the dog had the better psychology, operating along a straight line be- tween two points, totally indifferent to reverse curves or any other fool idea.

Here was a mind trained up to professorial level testing a mind that was not trained at all. Which of the two came out best? If at bodily dissolution only one could survive, which would it be ? I withhold my own answer, for one was a prof essor— and of Psychology, no less — while the other was only a dog.

THE DOG THAT COULD LIVE NO LONGER

When a boy or a girl of fourteen years or under commits suicide the newspapers play up the story. It makes the front page easily if the unhappy departed belong to a family of large means, the kind of family whose head comes under the reportorial classification of Wealthy Clubman. In the lexicon of youth that fate reserves for a bright manhood there is supposed to be no such word as suicide.

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Not so with dogs. Cases are well known where a dog has actually reasoned out the way to euthanasia. Such a one brought a watery finish to a dog that belonged to the family of Tom Devereaux.

Tom had given this dog in its puppyhood to Mrs. Devereaux before she became Mrs. Devereaux. It was her dog and nobody's else. Its peculiar and favorite place of rest was Mrs. Devereaux's lap. It grew to be quite a big dog, long enough to lop over at both ends, but this made no difference until little Herbert came.

The dog was at once infatuated with the baby. The baby loved the dog, and the dog found delight in rolling with him on the floor and in those dear indignities which human babies put upon dogs. Only one thing dark- ened their otherwise cordial relations. The dog resented Herbert's usurpation of his place on the lap. It would try to push him off, and took with ill grace reproof for doing so. At last came an afternoon when patience at this monstrous favoritism broke, and the dog softly but with firm admonition nipped Herbert's hand; whereupon Mrs. Devereaux took down

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a theretofore merely ornamental thong, and gave the dog a thorough lacing.

He took it in silence, and when it was over waited until someone opened the door. Then he bolted through, headed straight down the street to a pier that jutted into the lake, raced to the end of it, pitched off and drowned, re- fusing rescue.

THE CAT THAT PERSUADED ITSELE

A wholly different course of reasoning was taken by the cat Romeo, of Indianapolis. Romeo was so named partly because of his amatory record, partly because he was pop- ular with Romeo Johnson, a star member of The Indianapolis Journal staff. He lived in a gaudy barroom around the corner from The Journal office.

First time I saw him, I had gone into that joint with Romeo for a purpose then common but now outlawed. At the far end of the bar lay the most dreadfully dirty cat I ever had seen. He seemed to have been rolled in an ash pile after a bath of molasses. His hair was kinked and spiked like a pickaninny's. His eyes were like cove oysters far gone. His tail was a thing of deep discouragement. And

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he was drunk. In the literal sense, beastly drunk.

Romeo Johnson spilled part of his cocktail before him. He licked it up, and waited for more. No more being offered, he slithered off the bar, lapped at the waste beer in the trough below, and had to be helped back to his station by the bartender, who said

"He's about ripe now. This is gonna be a bad day for dogs."

I was informed it was his custom when properly primed to go forth in the world and offer combat to his natural enemies, could any such be found; that on his appearance every dog in the street would promptly reef his tail and beat it out of that, with all celerity. He was bad medicine.

A year later being again in Indian- apolis, I asked Romeo about his namesake.

"Come see him," said Romeo.

Around the corner went we, and into that same place. At the end of the bar lay a large and glossy torn, with topaz eyes. Every hair of his shining coat was black. He was a beauty, but a haughty one — for a he.

Leisurely he gat him up and with elegance walked down the bar to where we stood, gave

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us a stony glare, went back to where he had been, his tail sticking straight up in the air, superciliously indifferent to all things, espe- cially to us.

I asked for the souse cat I had seen there before and had not forgotten.

"That is he," said Romeo, ostentatiously grammatical.

"Yep," said the barkeep, "that's him."

Now developed a story showing that even a cat has more than merely animal senses. As time passed, the cat Romeo had gradually lost his power to eliminate alcohol. This was brought home to him with a shock one day when he was so far gone that his legs got out of control. He had accumulated the load of his life and had gone on what he still believed to be the war path.

By the kerb stood a farmer's wagon from somewhere out Broad Ripple way, and under this wagon was a dog that never before had been off the farm, and therefore knew not Romeo. Against this innocent stranger Romeo projected himself with such force as was in him. The dog received him gladly with a stiff foreleg defense which wrould have discon- certed Romeo sober, but was by far too much

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for Romeo stewed; and the next he knew he was being rolled and worried, helpless and outdone. He did what any cat would do in a case where valor failed. He started to climb a tree.

But the tree he tried to climb happened to be a steel trolley pole. The rest is painful. He regained the bar room with that demon dog still rolling him, and was saved by a bung-starter in the hands of his side kick, the bartender.

He refused the liquid consolation preferred by the side kick after he had placed him tenderly on the bar. He seemed stunned, as it were, for his world had caved and crashed in upon him. He wanted to be alone with his hurts and his thoughts. It was not until the next day that he seemed to have reached a conclusion on which he could safely stand: if that stuff put him where he could not climb a tree, it was no stuff for him thenceforth. And he never took another drink.

Had that tomcat a mind? Could he think? Could he reason? Could he conquer and govern himself? Of course he had. Of course he could and did. How many men af- flicted with a similar appetite could so com- pletely and on only a first warning have done

m

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the same thing, with no help other than their own reasoning power, no tapering off, no cure save from within? Set beside him a human sot, and of the two which would be of the beasts that perish, which have a soul to save alive?

HYPNOTISM

Along in the early eighteen-nineties a cheer- ful Chicago young man named William Ken- nedy started out to draw a streak of astonish- ment round the world, and did it. Certainly, he did it.

He was a Professor by the time he reached Omaha — a Professor of Hypnotism. Con- cerning what he could not do with an hypnotic subject I am uninformed, but what he could do was a-plenty. He reached his peak at London.

What he did or where he went afterward might be covered with Paul's favorite evasion, "I do not know. God knoweth." But while he was at the peak I saw him do many things that would defy explanation by any ordinary knowledge of human nature or natural law. Some of these things were grotesque in the extreme. Some were outrageously funny, some merely outrageous, some impossible — until you saw them. Things under this latter

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head could be put into print, but the print would be denied the mails.

By way of compliment Kennedy gave & private exhibition to a party of us after the public performance one evening, and its ex- treme character may be guessed when I tell you some of us begged him to stop it, while the more squeamish left the place with what dignity they might.

His regular platform elucidations were enough to make anyone sit up. I had a party in a stage box one evening. In my party were a noble earl, a renowned American actor, an officer of Roy al Horse Artillery, the London correspondent of the New York Sun, and the head of a great county family. Kennedy played up strong for us.

His method was to call for skeptics to come forward and test his power, and usually he got genuine responses up to a half dozen or so. He made no secret from me of having volun- teers planted in the house, but it is only fair to say he never called them up unless there were not enough others. Two of these shil- labers (as such are styled in the show business — "shills" for short) he carried with him, but for self evident reasons they could only be

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used occasionally in any long metropolitan run.

THE ORTHODOX PARTY AND THE "BABY"

That evening one of the genuine volunteers was a little, bearded, orthodox Jew, with Houndsditch writ large all over him, a mili- tant nonbeliever, who declared himself invinci- ble and was present with hostile intent. Within ten minutes Kennedy had him believ- ing he was a nursemaid. He had a gown and bonnet on and carried a babe in arms. The babe was a young pig, unruly, vocal, and slip- pery. The rage and humiliation of that orthodox little man when Kennedy snapped him awake, were pitiful. There he was, gowned like a woman and fondling an Unclean Thing. He tore the gown, cursed the pig bit- terly, emitted a torrent of Houndsditch He- brew, and fell into tears, and had to be led away. Our noble earl was moved to extreme oration.

"My word!" said he.

Our artillery officer was even more emo- tional. He observed,

"I say, you know."

THE EXPERT FROM THE AUDIENCE

Kennedy stood a half dozen subjects in a

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row. To one of them he handed a great goblet filled to the brim with something viscous and opaque.

"You are a judge of wine/' said he, "and I want your opinion of this Chateau Lafitte. Will you please taste it for me?"

The subject took the goblet and sipped from it like a connoisseur, rolling the sip under his tonque and smacking his lips, a smile of ecstasy irradiating his face; and he was going to gulp the goblet empty when Kennedy took it from him (not too easily) and waked him up. Then he let him smell it.

The man would have had an eruption then and there if Kennedy had not snapped him back and told him he would have no memory of it after he waked up.

Kennedy brought the goblet across to our box and handed it to me.

"Pass it around," he said.

I did not. I handed it back in haste. The dainty exhilarant it contained was a mixture of neat's foot oil, turpentine, and asafoetida. I had to throw away my gloves, but even at that the fingers of my right hand were un- pleasantly reminiscent three or four days.

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KENNEDY AND THE GREAT PRINCE

By royal command (a fictional locution) Kennedy gave a private demonstration one afternoon for the then Prince of Wales (after- ward King Edward VII). Royal command stuff usually is pulled at a royal residence, but the old Queen was quite a dragon about such things, and the Prince was a royal good fellow, democratic, without frills. He didn't mind coming to Kennedy, since Kennedy couldn't go to Marlborough House. With him was his secretary (Colonel Knollys) and two or three personal friends. It was not much of a show, for Kennedy felt himself restricted. The Prince did not believe he could be put under control, and went so far as to dare Kennedy to try it on.

A determined man may by opposing his will set any hypnotiser at bay; and the Prince had a strong will. Kennedy tried his utmost. His forehead was beaded before the Prince's eyelids began to droop. He stretched out his arms and the Prince was about to fall into them when Colonel Knollys interposed an arm and said

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"This has gone far enough."

It had, but the Prince gave in and compli- mented Kennedy, and went even to the length of shaking hands, a most notable thing in a country where hands never are shaken unless under unusual conditions or for extraordinary reasons. As Bide Dudley would say, "all were pleased."

THE HYPNOTIC PROCESS

The psychology and physiology of hypno- tism have their operative seat in that part of the brain which lies just inside the opening through which the spinal cord enters the skull and is known as the Medulla Oblongata. It is cone-shaped, a little more than an inch high, and about an inch across at the base. Above it lies the cerebellum, or little brain ; and above that the cerebrum, or great brain. The three divisions are connected by a bridge of nerve tissues. They constitute a complete organ, in De^Quincy's definition of an organ as a group of parts which act upon each other, the whole in turn acting upon the parts.

The medulla is the primary brain, acting as a conductor of motor and sensory impressions from all parts of the body.

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The hypnotic influence begins at the front of the brain, just back of the eyes. Thence it flows to the second (the little) brain; and through that to the primary brain at the base of the skull, where it takes possession and dur- ing its occupancy completely controls all the processes and actions of the man. The man himself, his mind, his soul and his spirit, have been dispossessed. An alien reigns.

"Hypnotism" is a word of comparatively modern origin. It was first employed by Doctor Brain, an English student of psychic phe- nomena. Such phenomena divide themselves in two classes, upon what may be termed the principle of causation.

The first of these two classes includes all phenomena produced while the will of the subject is under control of an operator, a hypnotist. The second class includes those which occur independently of hypnotic control.

The term "hypnotism" includes both classes, as well as the various processes by and through which they are produced.*

* From this point I follow largely an article by the author of "The Harmonic Series."— W. D. E.

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The relation between hypnotist and subject does not involve continuing domination by the hypnotist or continuing passivity of the sub- ject. But it has been demonstrated beyond all doubt that a hypnotist can completely con- trol the will and the voluntary powers of his subject during continuance of the hypnotic relation.

Says Doctor Luys of the Charity Hospital of Paris, in his Clinical Lectures:

"You cannot only oblige this defenseless being (hypnotised subject), who is incapable of opposing the slightest resistance, to give from hand to hand anything you choose, but you can also make him sign a promise, draw up a bill of exchange, or any kind of agree- ment. You can make him write an holo- graphic will, which he will hand over to you, and of which he will never know the existence. He is ready to fulfill the minutest legal formal- ities, and will do so with a calm, serene and natural manner which would deceive the most expert law officers. He will not hesitate either, you may be sure, to make a denuncia- tion, or bear false witness. He is the passive instrument of your will."

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Professor De Lawrence says in his work on hypnotism:

"There is a way in which a shrewd hypnotist can succeed in putting people under the in- fluence who really do not care to be hypnotized.

"The author has, during his years of ex- perience, discovered and sucessfully used a method by which he has suceeded in hypnotiz- ing a great many people against their will, who never had been operated on before.

"You can then proceed by a few well chosen suggestions to put a man dead asleep and in- duce somnambulism or trance in the regular way. He will ever afterward be your subject if you understand your business in giving post- hypnotic suggestions."

One of the manifestations which usually fol- low the inception of the hypnotic process is the inability of the subject to control the objective and perceptive faculties of his mind. His physical sensory organism becomes confused in its reports of the outside world. He begins to receive mixed and imperfect impressions.

As the condition is intensified those con- volutions of the brain which lie immediately above and back of the eyes pass into a state of complete anaesthesia, or temporary par-

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alysis. The voluntary perception of the phys- ical world is destroyed. Consciousness is driven back from the objective, rational plane. The will of the operator comes into partial control of the channels through which the con- sciousness of the subject is reached upon the spiritual plane.

Dr. John Duncan Quackenboss, Professor Emeritus, Columbia University, says in his work on "Hypnotism in Mental and Moral Culture" that "It has long been known that a human being can be thrown into an artificial sleep, during which he sustains such a relation to an operator who has induced it that he is sensitive only to what the operator tells him he is sensitive to, and is wholly subject, so far as his mental operations and physical actions are concerned, to the volition of his hypnotist, A hypnotized person sees, hears, tastes, smells and feels what the operator says that he sees, hears, tastes, smells and feels — and nothing else.

"A simple illustration will prove this. Let the subject's ears be completely muffled in such manner as to shut out the sound of the operator's voice. Then let the operator throw him into hypnosis. It will be found that he

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will hear just the same, and will obtain exactly the same impression, as before his ears were muffled.

"Or instead of muffling the subject's ears, let a dozen or more of the spectators present create all the noise and confusion possible. Let them carry this so far that no one in the room can hear a word the operator says. With all this noise going on, repeat the experiment. It will be found that exactly the same results will ob- tain. The noise which otherwise would drown the operator's voice will have no effect upon the subject. He will seemingly hear every word the operator says — and nothing else."

An impulse of a human soul formulated into a definite thought becomes a force. This force may be impressed upon the conscious- ness of another soul without the aid of words either spoken, written or printed, without any use whatever of the physical sensory organs. It may be accomplished through spiritual agencies exclusively, and the channels through which this may be accomplished are the spirit- ual sensory organs, which are analogous to the physical sensory organs in number and char- acter, except that they operate upon a higher plane of vibratory activity.

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That is precisely what occurs in the stage of hypnosis above described. The physical sensory organism is for the time being com- pletely paralyzed. It conveys no impressions to the imprisoned consciousness of the subject. In this condition all the channels of ingress to the subject's consciousness are under control of the operator, who for the time being is an absolute censor, possessing unlimited authority and power. The subject sees nothing, hears nothing, feels nothing; is, in fact, conscious of nothing save the dominating presence and power of his hypnotist's will.

This contravenes the theory that a subject cannot by hypnotic process be impelled to commit a crime. A Michigan court a few years ago admitted evidence of hypnotic influ- ence in a trial for murder, and a verdict was returned not against the man who did the physical act of murder, but against the man who hypnotized and then directed him to do it. This was an extreme instance, but the average experiment will carry far enough to prove the open possibility of criminal hypnotic practice. I have seen Kennedy, Carpenter and others experimentally demonstrate it:

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The subject is first hypnotized. He is then strongly impressed with the suggestion that a certain person there present has deeply wronged him and deserves to be killed. He is given a knife and commanded to kill that person. He proceeds to carry out the com- mand. He even carries it to the point of stealthily approaching the victim and raising the knife over him — but he will not strike.

Why does he stop at this critical point?

Because he is impelled by the real motive and intention in the mind of his hypnotist, not by the spoken word of command. In this condition and relation words mean nothing to him unless they convey the real intent of the mind that projects them. In fact the subject does not hear the words of command at all. He receives only the conscious intent of his hypnotist, who cannot project upon his sub- ject the impulse of murder unless there is in the background of his own mind the criminal impulse which inspires murder.

Man depends upon his physical senses to inform him of his immediate physical environ- ment. He is not yet fully aware that he has a spiritual organism, for it seldom has been

254 Spirit Life

called into action in such manner as to identify it as something apart from his physical being. But though the physical sensory organism yields to the paraylzing effects of the hypnotic process, the spiritual continues its activity through even the final stages of hypnosis. In this independence, the spiritual organism takes temporarily the place of the physical in its relation to the subject's consciousness, becom- ing the only channel by which he receives im- pressions from without. Therefore whatever he receives through this channel has verity to him. Every thought of the operator, every impulse of his will, makes an impression upon the subject's consciousness as definite as the tangible objects of nature in his waking state. They constitute the only world with which for the time he is in touch. It is not strange but perfectly natural that "he sees, hears, tastes, smells and feels what the operator says that he sees, hears, tastes, smells and feels — and nothing else. . . , For the time being his individuality is surrendered to the person who has hypnotized him."

The final stage of hypnosis involves the complete suspension of physical animation.

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In this state every function of the physical or- ganism is wholly arrested. Respiration ceases, circulation stops. The body, in some in- stances, becomes cold and rigid, has every out- ward appearance of physical death. In its physiological aspect, complete functional sus- pension has actually occurred.

In its downward sweep through the central nervous organism the hypnotic process has overwhelmed the primary brain and the in- voluntary or reflex centers of nervous energy. In this condition the body is no longer an active part of the individual. But as the physical organism is silenced and gradually paralyzed, the impulses which reach his consciousness through the spiritual sensory organism become more and more distinct. There is nothing to divert his attention from the impressions which reach him through that organism alone. The hypnotist commands his undivided attention. Hence it is that in exact proportion as this state of hypnosis is attained, the consciousness of the subject responds to the will of the operator. This explains why the hypnotist, by a simple command or impulse of the will, can awaken his subject.

256 Spirit Life

Reverting to the definition of hypnotism, it will be observed that it involves elements and conditions which are strangely analogous to those involved in the crime of burglary. That is to say:

1. There must be at least two parties to the transaction.

2. One of these must (as it were) enter the temple of the other.

3. The one so entering must take unlaw- ful possession of that which of right belongs to the other.

The analogy between these two processes might be carried much farther, but it is only intended here to suggest the fundamental fact that they both involve the commission of a wrong by one person against another. Both therefore involve a violation of law, for whicli offense there are corresponding penalties.

The individual who throws himself into the artificial sleep invites thereby many results and conditions of which he is generally igno- rant. Among others, he makes it easily possi- ble for any one of these results to obtain :

1. He may, unless interfered with, thus withdraw his consciousness from the objective

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plane of physical nature and in a perfectly conscious manner — through the medium of his spiritual sensory organs — see and hear oc- currences upon the spiritual plane within the range of spiritual vision, hearing and observa- tion. His waking memory of all he has thus observed and experienced will be commen- surate with the extent to which his conscious- ness still occupies and continues to register through the third physical brain. If the ob- jective faculties alone are asleep upon the physical plane, all that part of the third brain lying back of and above the organs of percep- tion is awake and active, and the waking mem- ory will be clear and distinct.

2. But he may go still farther and with- draw all consciousness from even the third physical brain. In this case he brings back to his waking consciousness no remembrance of what he may have seen, heard or observed through the medium of his spiritual sensory organs.

3. In either condition the door is wide open to the hypnotist (from either plane of life) vrho may chance to pass that way. If it be a physically embodied hypnotist, he may enter the domain of the sleeper's soul and take

258 Spirit Life

undisputed possession and control without the least resistance or opposition. The sleeper becomes a hypnotic subject and can be made to produce such phenomena as the operator would be able to "suggest" or command if he had obtained his control in the ordinary way.

4. There are physically disembodied hyp- notists as well as those yet in the physical body. Those physically disembodied intelligences commonly known as "spirits" represent all kinds and classes of individuals. The lower the type, the more closely they approach the purely physical plane.

The ignorant and the vicious upon the spir- itual side of life generally seek to attach them- selves to earth conditions as closely as possible. There are perfectly natural reasons for this desire, as well as for the efforts they put forth to accomplish its realization.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. XV, has this:

"Certain persons are more readily hypno- tized than others, and it has been observed that once the condition has been successfully in- duced, it can be more easily induced a second time, a third time more easily than a second, and so on until the patient may be so pliant to

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the will of the operator that a fixed look, or a wave of the hand, may throw him at once into the hypnotic condition/'

Science has followed the hypnotist and his subject into that realm of spiritual life which has been designated "the unknowable." It has there gathered many additional facts of nature which it is able to definitely formulate. Among those additional facts which have a specific bearing upon the subject are:

1. Hypnotism, in its essential nature, is a subjective psychic process.

2. Its most direct and essential results are related to and registered upon the soul, rather than upon the physical body.

3. As might readily be anticipated, there- fore, physical death does not necessarily break, destroy, counteract nor even mitigate the hyp- notic relation when that relation has been fully entered into and established upon the physical plane.

A suggestive hint of this underlying fact may be obtained from an experiment which is already familiar to both hypnotists and stu- dents.

For instance, it is a well-known fact that a "suggestion" or command given to a subject

260 Spirit Life

while he is in a state of profound hypnosis, to be executed or performed at some future time, will be obeyed with absolute fidelity at the time and place and in the exact manner prescribed. Professor De Lawrence says :

"Suggest to a subject that in ninety days from a given date he will come to your house with his coat on inside out, and he will most certainly do so."

Thus it has come to be known that the hyp- notic relation, once established^ continues in- definitely. Not only this, it continues even though the hypnotist may have entirely for- gotten both the subject and the incident in the meantime. It continues though the subject be wholly unconscious of the fact. It con- tinues regardless of the will, wish, memory or knowledge of either party, or of both. It continues though the parties be separated as far as the opposite poles of the earth. It con- tinues without regard to time, place, distance or physical environment. It continues, in fact, unbroken and unabated until both shall come to recognize the law they thus have violated, and shall of their own volition unite in an effort to restore themselves to a normal rela- tion. Even then it often becomes a labor of

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years for both to return to the condition of independence.

With these facts in mind, those who know that there is a life beyond the grave will readily understand and appreciate the horrible truth than even physical death is of itself no barrier to the operation of hypnotic power once the hypnotic relation has been fully entered into.

For this is but another demonstration of the continuity of natural law. Every law of in- dividual life upon the physical plane has its correlation upon the spiritual planes of being. They are but the same laws running through all the varied phases and conditions of nature.

As a natural sequence, it has been found that in every instance where the hypnotist sur- vives his subject upon the physical plane, the disembodied subject remains bound by the same inexorable law that bound him upon earth. He is so bound notwithstanding the physically embodied hypnotist may be entirely ignorant of the fact and quite unconscious of the bond. This strange bondage continues throughout the lifetime of the hypnotist, and during this term, however long or short it may be, the subject is known upon the spiritual planes of life as an "earth-bound" soul.

THE LITTLE GOLDEN SNAKES

In this year of nineteen-twenty the billboards suffered a chromatic eruption having to do with the name of Thurston. This Thurston is a wizard, a prestidigitateur, an expert in those amazing and amusing matters where the Hand is Quicker than the Eye. That is to say, rela- tively an expert. The great expert to whose place and popularity he aspires was a plain, a simple man, who hid an ingenuous mind behind a Mephistophelean face — Herman the Great. Herman the Great was a wonder.

Once when he had penetrated as far as Con- stantinople in the course of a tour intended to arouse superstitious curiosity in the minds of Europe's (then) crowned heads, he was com- manded to accompany the Sultan on the royal yacht down (or up) the Bosphorus, a pleasant trip on a summer afternoon.

The Sultan was a dour, solemn creature, Abdul Azziz of foetid memory. Abdul be- lieved in sorcery and was not above cultivating experts therein, with a view to possible em- ployment in his own little underhand affairs;

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and Herman had the Arabian wizards flopping and gasping on the grass, thereby commending himself as a desirable possibility in palace man- agement. On this trip he had the Sultan's suite invoking whatever powers that sort of people would naturally look to, but Abdul him- self was not very deeply interested until Her- man borrowed his watch, threw it overboard, followed with a fishhook at the end of a line, promptly hauled in a protesting fish, cut the fish open, took from its entrails the Sultan's watch, handed it over to the chief eunuch or secretary of the treasury or something, made his best stage bow, and retired aft.

Next day he staid in his hotel, awaiting largess. About the noon hour a messenger from the palace was announced. Herman ordered his admission and began to speculate whether the bag would be full of diamonds or rubies. The messenger came in, accompanied by two soldiers, and handed him a written order to depart out of Constantinople that same day, or suffer the consequences, which in that capi- tal and those days would probably have taken the form of boiling oil. He departed, escorted by the soldiers. However:

Herman was playing a summer engagement

264 Spirit Life

at McVieker's theatre the day he came upon Mr. McVicker and myself while we were talk- ing about some weird things that had happened through the apparently unconscious agency of the same Mrs. Simpson heretofore mentioned in these pages. He was interested at once, and also at once made proclamation that all such performances were "hanky-pank," and that he could duplicate any of them. We took him up at that, and sent him over to Mrs. Simpson. In an hour or so he came back, somewhat shaken and considerably wrought up.

Mrs. Simpson's consulting room was what is or was known as a hall room at the back of the house. It had only one door and one window, and the window gave upon a back yard with grass on it and a narrow board walk leading to a gate in a high board fence on an alleyway. The floor of the room was bare. There was a plain wooden table, on each side of which stood a Windsor chair. Herman took one of these, Mrs. Simpson the other.

It was a warm afternoon, but clear, and Herman was trying to make conversation, when of a sudden there was a whirl of wind in the back yard, wind filled with a fine glitter like gold dust in the sunlight; and this gold dust

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swirled in through the window and then swirled out again, leaving the table covered with little golden snakes, an inch or two long, dozens and dozens of them, all alive and all wriggling in a most intricate manner. Though Herman was startled almost out of his seat, he came back in a flash and grabbed at them, but caught nothing — for there was nothing to be caught. The little gold snakes had vanished into air. The table, the room, Mrs. Simpson and the soft summer afternoon, were as they had been; and that was all.

"Best trick I've ever seen," said he, telling us about it. "I must find out how she did it. I could use it."

Next time I saw her, I asked Mrs. Simpson for an explanation.

"There isn't any," said she. "It just hap- pened so."

THE SUM OF THE MATTER

Legitimately admissible evidence shows cer- tain powers of excarnate intelligence as active in the world. Physical science has advanced its method so far beyond the old horizon that an inference of continuous individual life is not to be avoided.

The province thus doubly indicated has been known to a few in all ages. The mind of our western world is uneasily curious about it, and that unease is symptomatic of a change in our whole body of spiritual and ethical ideology; but we do not yet see anything that adds to or takes away from the message of Jesus, given though it was to a world that has clouded it with many puerile interpretations.

That message, like all that ever were deliv- ered by the High Ones, has at its heart a steadfast assurance of the continuity of in- dividual existence, and on this we may rest. It discloses death as an incident in life, in- voluntary as birth, and quite as necessary. In

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other words, life before birth as well as after death — the doctrine of repeated bodily lives, of which we hear too much that is too vague,

I am not sure any attempt to extend knowledge in that direction is important, since the knowledge itself will come when it will come, and would mean little until then. But the wisdom of one age is the joke of another. Since the frustration of those finalities which prevailed before the advent of Galileo, science has found new lights, tending to show human- ity as included in that scheme of perpetuity which lies at the base of existence in the lower strata, and gives us the only definition of the universe that responds at all to reason.

Newton saw an apple fall, and found the law of gravitation. That incident made pos- sible a knowledge of the trajectory of our sun, and now we know the course and at least a part of the story of the world we inhabit.

A billionth rate world it is, revolving around a millionth rate sun, that in turn travels a long ellipse within one end of which blazes another sun, known to us as the star Aldaberan. At the other end are cold voids, spacy vasts of absolute zero. Outside it swims the star Polaris.

268 Spirit Life

Astronomical history is old enough in authentic records to show that somewhat more than two thousand years ago Aldaberan was visible only as a luminous speck. Now it blazes in the evening sky, a beacon among the glittering points of fire that strew the firma- ment this side the milky way.

The rate of travel of our sun through space, with its little group of satellites, has been de- termined. Southward through the heavens we race, five hundred million miles a year, along an arc whose segment shows undeviating progresss in the one direction of that growing point of light, and whose projection in unmis- takable nodes will carry us close around it, and then away, along a wide and awful sweep, toward Polaris, to the extreme curve that must be passed before the journey back again begins.

How many times the sun and this our planet have swung that course, only the power that hangeth the worlds upon nothing ever can know. That we are now more than half way down the journey and entering on a spring- like opening to a young summer of celestial weather, is clear to those whose study is the sky.

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The mathematics has shown by comparison of the gravitational power of all the greater stars in our region of the universe that the line we are following is shaped by the influ- ence of Aldaberan, and that its direction will carry us around that star in somewhat more than twenty-five thousand years. The turn will bring us so near to it, and into a zone of heat so high, that physical life in its present form will be impossible ; for the sun Aldaberan is incandescent. The shadowy old belief that the world shall die in fire, enwrapped a truth — as most old beliefs are found to do when they are understood.

At the other end of the oval are thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice. Flung to the ex- treme limit of its course before it turns ir answer to its other magnet, our and the other worlds that circle with it will dim and fall into a sleep of cold so deep that life again will be suspended, to again awaken and again begin a new development as the southward turn is made and warmth flows in once more.

The story of the earth takes a fresh mean- ing in the light of these readings of the heavens. The glacial periods, the wavering poles, the change in land and water surfaces, begin to

270 Spirit Life

clear themselves up. Two thousand years take our solar system but a very little way on its long travel between its gravitational seats. Almost 150,000 years are required for the circuit; yet the last two thousand years have shown a steadily increasing warmth. In the time of Csesar the rivers of Italy were thickly frozen in the winter, and the north of Europe was a sullen forest, whose scant barbarian tribes clothed themselves in the skins of wild animals. Egypt and India were lands of sunshine, whose peoples had inherited from millennia beyond much of the knowledge we are rediscovering now. The knowledge that enabled the builders of the pyramid of Ghizeh to make an orientation sixteen lines nearer the true than Tycho Brahe could define four hun- dred years ago, was not held by men who viewed with naked and unaided eyes the stars above the bare sands of their Lybian desert. High knowledge alone could have enabled them to place that pile in the exact center of the earth's land and water distribution. They were the heirs of an earlier summer of science, that gradually ebbed away as the sun rolled forward into fuller geniality, and spread more fruitful life toward the north.

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Time after time the world has spun that far-flung oval, and life has risen and flourished in the rising heat, to fail in fiery floods. Time after time has the world returned to days of Arcady and golden ages, to sweep away again into the stellar north so far that the grip of icy death was fast upon it.

And in the many thousand-years of spring- time that led to each of these sidereal summers, the other many thousand-years of autumn that closed in unimaginable sidereal winters, how many races of men have risen, and striven, and been perfected, and passed away, each to it- self the sum of all that ever was or could be? How many more will walk the earth, and live, and love, and strive, and pass into the oblivious void, before the earth itself shall cease to be?

Races and nations innumerable, busy with their gods and governments, have possessed it before and since the last long winter, as we possess it now. Names have filled it, worship and sacrifice have been given to deities, all as real as the names and races and the gods we know, and have slipped into the shoreless ocean of forgotten ages, as we shall do; and so it shall be through all the unguessable seons that Aldaberan and his groups, our own among

272 Spirit Life

them, will roll on their appointed way around another sun to which Aldaberan is as ours to him — for ever, and for ever. The ineffable stars are unaware of us.

Tangibility is nature's transitory phase, ap- pearing and dissolving in processes that are slow only in terms of our exterior consciousness. Only the unseen is immortal. Sense, dimly manifested in our outward contact, indicates the one enduring quantity. Man passes, but the spirit of man is not to die.

Rank after rank, the souls of men sweep with the swinging sun toward its turning point, growing with each return to bodily integu- ments, becoming finer and clearer as every season passes toward the Aldaberanian sol- stice, till the earth is cleared for yet another cycle, and those who have used it will need it no more, but will depart to other kingdoms of life, where dwell such beings as those the elder peoples dreamed of and called angels. We shall live then in houses not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. The worlds shall fall away.

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