woman's jaw,
and it was the mercy of Providence that ever she came across _me_. My
organisation was found to have almost complete, and quite easy, control
over hers, and with a few passes I could expel her Legion.

'Well, you never saw anyone so singular in personal appearance as my
friend, Miss Wilson. Medicine-man as I am, I could never behold her
suddenly without a sensation of shock: she suggested so inevitably what
we call "the _other_ world," one detecting about her some odour of the
worm, with the feeling that here was rather ghost than woman. And yet I
can hardly convey to you the why of this, except by dry details as to
the contours of her lofty brow, meagre lips, pointed chin, and ashen
cheeks. She was tall and deplorably emaciated, her whole skeleton,
except the thigh-bones, being quite visible. Her eyes were of the bluish
hue of cigarette smoke, and had in them the strangest, feeble, unearthly
gaze; while at thirty-five her paltry wisp of hair was quite white.

'She was well-to-do, and lived alone in old Wooding Manor-house, five
miles from Ash Thomas. As you know, I was "beginning" in these parts at
the time, and soon took up my residence at the manor. She insisted that
I should devote myself to her alone; and that one patient constituted
the most lucrative practice which I ever had.

'Well, I quickly found that, in the state of trance, Miss Wilson
possessed very remarkable powers: remarkable, I mean, not, of course,
because peculiar to herself in _kind_, but because they were so
constant, reliable, exact, and far-reaching, in degree. The veriest
fledgling in psychical science will now sit and discourse finically to
you about the reporting powers of the mind in its trance state--just as
though it was something quite new! This simple fact, I assure you, which
the Psychical Research Society, only after endless investigation, admits
to be scientific, has been perfectly well known to every old crone since
the Middle Ages, and, I assume, long previously. What an unnecessary air
of discovery! The certainty that someone in trance in Manchester can
tell you what is going on in London, or in Pekin, was not, of course,
left to the acumen of an office in Fleet Street; and the society, in
establishing the fact beyond doubt for the general public, has not gone
one step toward explaining it. They have, in fact, revealed nothing that
many of us did not, with absolute assurance, know before.

'But talking of poor Miss