element of which they are
in search, that, like the fat boy in Pickwick, they merely want to make
their flesh creep, no harm is done. The harm is done by people who are
really in search of sensation, who yet profess to be approaching the
question in a scientific spirit of inquiry. I enjoy a good ghost story
as much as any one; and I am interested, too, in hearing the
philosophical conclusions of earnest-minded people; but to hear the
question discussed, as one so often hears it, with a pretentious
attempt to treat it scientifically, by people who, like the White Queen
in Through the Looking-glass, find it pleasant to train themselves to
believe a dozen impossible things before breakfast, afflicts me with a
deep mental and moral nausea.

One, at least, of the patient investigators of this accumulated mass of
human delusion, took up the quest in the hope that he might receive
scientific evidence of the continued existence of identity. He was
forced to confess that the evidence went all the other way, and that
all the tales which appeared to substantiate the fact, were hopelessly
discredited. The only thing, as I have said, that the investigations
seem to have substantiated, is evidence which none but a determinedly
sceptical mind would disallow, that there does exist, in certain
abnormal cases, a possibility of direct communication between two or
more living minds.

But, as I pondered thus, the day began to darken over the rough pasture
with its ruined wall, and I felt creeping upon me that old inheritance
of humanity, that terror in the presence of the unseen, which sets the
mind at work, distorting and exaggerating the impressions of eye and
ear. How easy, in such a mood, to grow tense and expectant--

"Till sight and hearing ache
For something that may keep
The awful inner sense
Unroused, lest it should mark
The life that haunts the emptiness
And horror of the dark."

Face to face with the impenetrable mystery, with the thought of those
whom we have loved, who have slipped without a word or a sign over the
dark threshold, what wonder if we beat with unavailing hands against
the closed door? It would be strange if we did not, for we too must
some day enter in; well, the souls of all those who have died, alike
those whom we have loved, and the spirits of those old Romans whose
mortal bodies melted into smoke year after year in the little enclosure
into which I look, know whatever th