o, though
his finger seemed to pass through the man. Something prevented his doing
this, but what it was he finds it hard to describe. He compares the
obstacle to a sheet of glass.

"I felt as a kitten may feel," he said, "when it goes for the first time
to pat its reflection in a mirror." Again and again, on the occasion
when I heard him tell this story, Mr. Bessel returned to that comparison
of the sheet of glass. Yet it was not altogether a precise comparison,
because, as the reader will speedily see, there were interruptions of
this generally impermeable resistance, means of getting through the
barrier to the material world again. But, naturally, there is a very
great difficulty in expressing these unprecedented impressions in the
language of everyday experience.

A thing that impressed him instantly, and which weighed upon him
throughout all this experience, was the stillness of this place--he was
in a world without sound.

At first Mr. Bessel's mental state was an unemotional wonder. His
thought chiefly concerned itself with where he might be. He was out of
the body--out of his material body, at any rate--but that was not all.
He believes, and I for one believe also, that he was somewhere out of
space, as we understand it, altogether. By a strenuous effort of will
he had passed out of his body into a world beyond this world, a world
undreamt of, yet lying so close to it and so strangely situated with
regard to it that all things on this earth are clearly visible both from
without and from within in this other world about us. For a long time,
as it seemed to him, this realisation occupied his mind to the exclusion
of all other matters, and then he recalled the engagement with Mr.
Vincey, to which this astonishing experience was, after all, but a
prelude.

He turned his mind to locomotion in this new body in which he found
himself. For a time he was unable to shift himself from his attachment
to his earthly carcass. For a time this new strange cloud body of
his simply swayed, contracted, expanded, coiled, and writhed with his
efforts to free himself, and then quite suddenly the link that bound
him snapped. For a moment everything was hidden by what appeared to be
whirling spheres of dark vapour, and then through a momentary gap he saw
his drooping body collapse limply, saw his lifeless head drop sideways,
and found he was driving along like a huge cloud in a strange place of
shadowy clouds that had the luminous