when you were
young?" Phinuit (for him) replies at once, "Yes, I pretty nigh got
drowned. Tried to swim the creek, and we fellows all of us got into a
little boat. We got tipped over. He will remember it. Ask Bob if he
remembers that about swimming the creek; he ought to remember it." Uncle
Robert, consulted, remembers the incident perfectly, but gives different
details. This sort of confusion about the details of a distant event,
the partial memory, occurs often to all of us.

Thus disincarnated beings would seem to resemble incarnate ones on this
point also. Apparently it was not the boat which upset, but the two
young Lodges, Jerry and Robert, on getting out of it, began some
horse-play on the bank, and fell into the stream. They were obliged to
swim, fully dressed and against a strong current, which was carrying
them under a mill-wheel.

At the 46th sitting,[29] Phinuit reports that the last visit the father
of Professor Lodge paid was to this Uncle Robert, and that he didn't
feel very well. Professor Lodge knew nothing of this fact, or, if he had
once known it, had so completely forgotten it that he was obliged to
apply to one of his cousins to know if it was true. The cousin replied
in confirmation of the fact.

At the 82nd sitting,[30] Uncle Jerry, speaking of his brother Frank, who
is still living, expresses himself thus about an event of their
childhood,--

"Yes, certainly! Frank was full of life; he crawled under the thatch
once and hid. What a lot of mischief he was capable of doing. He would
do anything; go without shirt, swop hats, anything. There was a family
near named Rodney. He pounded one of their boys named John. Frank got
the best of it, and the boy ran; how he ran! His father threatened
Frank, but he escaped; he always escaped. He could crawl through a
smaller hole than another. He could shin up a tree quick as a monkey.
What a boy he was! I remember his fishing. I remember that boy wading up
to his middle. I thought he'd catch his death of cold; but he never
did."

This Uncle Frank was aged about 80, and was living in Cornwall: the
general description is characteristic. Professor Lodge wrote to him to
ask if the above details were correct. He replied, giving exact details:
"I recollect very well my fight with a boy in the corn field. It took
place when I was ten years old, and I suppose a bit of a boy-bully."

On the 29th November[31] Professor Henry Sidgwick, of Cambridge, had a
sitting wi