that a deceased child is beginning to learn to
read. This is an enormous difficulty, I repeat. I point it out without
trying to solve it; I am unable to offer a plausible explanation.
Professor Hyslop has tried, but I do not think he has succeeded.

CHAPTER XIX

The medium's return to normal life--Speeches made while the medium seems
to hover between the two worlds.

In Mrs Piper's case, the moments which precede the actual quitting of
the trance offer, at least at present, a special interest. I think it
well therefore to dwell on this point a little. To avoid endless
circumlocutions, I shall speak as if the spiritualistic hypothesis were
proved. Indeed, whatever the future fate of this hypothesis may be, and
in spite of the serious objection spoken of in the last chapter, it is,
I believe, the only one that can be reasonably adopted for the moment.

When the sitting is over and the automatic writing has ceased, Mrs Piper
begins to return gradually to her normal state. She then utters with
more or less distinctness some apparently disconnected phrases which it
is sometimes difficult to catch. She is like a person talking in sleep.
Dr Hodgson and Professor Hyslop have collected as many of these broken
sentences as they could, keeping them separately under a different
heading from the record of the rest of the sitting proper. At the end,
Mrs Piper often asks this odd question, "Did you hear my head snap?" And
after her head is supposed to have snapped she looks round her in
apparent astonishment and alarm, and then all is over, she no longer
remembers what she has said or written during the trance.

We shall see that these scraps of phrase are less incoherent than they
seem, and that it is worth while to collect them. Very often when
numerous unsuccessful efforts have been made to recall a proper name
during the sitting, Mrs Piper pronounces it when coming out of the
trance; when she is re-entering her body, the communicator or
communicators repeat the name to her insistently, and make great efforts
to cause her to remember and pronounce it as she comes out of the
trance. I have already quoted an example of this. M. Paul Bourget asked
the name of the town in which the artist he was communicating with had
killed herself. The name did not come, but Mrs Piper pronounced it as
she was leaving the trance--_Venice_. Mr Robert Hyslop's name was given
in the same way the first time, but accompanied by very significant