ux which
appeared to pass through her mind. She kept handling the lock of hair,
and said, "The person to whom this belongs is ill--weak," which was true
enough, but might, I thought, be a shot. I should mention, however, that
it was quite impossible Sibyl could know me. She had not even heard my
name. She then described a bedroom, with some person--she could not see
what person--lying in bed, and a lady in a blue dress bending over her.
This, again, I thought might flow out as a deduction from her premises
of the hair belonging to an invalid. The blue dress was correct enough,
but still so little special as to be a very possible coincidence. She
then, however, startled me by saying, "I notice this, that on the table
by the bedside, where the bottles of medicine are standing, milk has
been spilt--a large quantity--and not wiped up." This was a trivial
detail, not known to me at the time, but confirmed on subsequent
inquiry.

She then passed on to describe a second tableau, where the same person
in the blue dress was in a room _all hung over with plates_, along with
a gentleman whom she described very accurately. He was the occupant of
the house where the patient lay, and, having a hobby for old china, had
turned his dining-room into a sort of crockery shop by hanging it all
over with the delf.

This was curious enough, though not very convincing. It seemed as though
the influence of this person who had given me the hair was stronger than
that of the hair itself. With the second lock of hair we failed utterly.
She said that also came from a sick person, but a person not sick with
the same disease as the other. She was quite positive they came from
different people, and asked me to feel the difference of texture. I am
sorry, for Sibyl's sake, to say they both came from the same person, and
were cut at the same time, though from different parts of the head,
which made one look silkier than the other.

As a test of Sibyl's clairvoyance, this was not very satisfactory. She
read the inscription on a card when her eyes were bandaged, pressing it
to her forehead; but then olden experiences in the way of blindman's
buff convince me that it is very difficult to say when a person is
properly blinded.

Altogether, then, I never quite got over my previous disappointment at
Sibyl's bulk. Had she been pretty and frizzle-headed like Miss Annie Eva
Fay, or like Miss Showers or Miss Florence Cook, I might have been
disposed to make m