scraps of speech as follows. Mrs Piper first tried to pronounce the
name, then she said _Hyslop_, and went on,--

"I am he.[86] Tell him I am his father. I--Good-bye, sir. I shouldn't
take him away that way. Oh, dear. Do you see the man with the cross[87]
shut out everybody? Did you see the light? What made the man's hair all
fall off?"

Dr Hodgson asks, "What man?"

Mrs Piper.--"That elderly gentleman that was trying to tell me
something, but it wouldn't come."

At a first glance this passage seems mere incoherence, but all the
portions of sentences have a very clear meaning when they are examined
together with the events of the sitting. They are, as it seems,
commissions with which the medium is charged as she is returning into
her organism, or they are observations made among themselves by the
spirits present, which the medium automatically repeats, or they are the
observations and questions of the medium herself. All that Mrs Piper
says on coming out of the trance belongs to one of these three
categories.

In the passage quoted, the words, "I am he. Tell him that I am his
father," are a commission with which the medium is charged by Mr Robert
Hyslop. Mrs Piper takes leave of Robert Hyslop with the formula,
"Good-bye, sir." The phrases which follow, "Oh, dear. I shouldn't take
him away that way. Do you see the man with the cross shut out
everybody?" are the remarks of spirits repeated automatically, or Mrs
Piper's own remarks on Imperator, who, seeing the light exhausted,
imperiously sends off everybody, including Mr Robert Hyslop himself, in
spite of his desire to remain with his son. Imperator must even have
used some force, to justify the observation, "I should not take him away
that way." The final phrases are always Mrs Piper's own questions and
remarks: When she says, "Did you see the light?" she alludes without
doubt to the light of the other world, invisible to us. The other
sentences are clear enough, when we remember that Mr Robert Hyslop was
entirely bald. There are utterances like these, only apparently
incoherent on coming out of all the trances; but they vary in length.
The last words, if I am not mistaken, always come from Mrs Piper
herself, which is logically to be expected, since she gradually loses
the memory of the world she has just quitted, up to the definite moment
of waking, marked by the so-called snap in her head.

These speeches on coming out of trance constitute, in our eyes, one m