Lehal Library

and she thought I had been emulating Romeo and had chosen a singularly inappropriate time. She could hear her brother whistling merrily in the next room, and her mother coming up the stairs to hers, to see if she was getting up, as was her custom. Poor Elsie was in a terrible state. She wanted so desperately to warn me that discovery was only a matter of seconds, but she seemed paralysed and could not move or speak. I just stood there, solid and stolid, very serious and silent. Then as the door-knob turned, I vanished and her mother entered.... I verified that I was asleep at the time, but I had no memory of the happening." Here is another instance, from Phantasms of the Living, in which the appearance of the Double provided its own evidence. Mr. S. H. Beard, a member of the S.P.R. and of the Stock Exchange, on a certain Sunday evening in November, 1881, when living in London, had read of the great power which the human will is able to exercise, and determined, with the whole force of his being, to visit, in spirit form, the front bedroom of a house three miles distant in which two lady friends of his, Miss L. S. Verity and Miss E. C. Verity, were sleeping. He had not mentioned in any way his intention to try the experiment, since it was only on retiring to rest on that Sunday night that the project had occurred to him. He determined to be there at 1 a.m. and to make his presence felt. The next morning he was unaware of the success or failure of his experiment, but four days later, when he met the ladies, the elder told him, though he had made no allusion to the subject, that on Sunday night, at about one o'clock, she had been terrified by seeing him, in evening dress, standing by her