hreads, the tapes that bound her? She brought books, shook the table,
touched us--How?"

"I don't know; but there must be some perfectly natural way of
explaining it. There is no place for the supernatural in my world. She
seems a nice, simple little woman, and yet this very simplicity may be a
means of throwing us off our guard. I will give a hundred dollars for
permission to hold her hands while the cone is moving."

"If you do not believe in tacks, will you believe in the touch of your
fingers?"

"If she permits me to hold her and the cone moves I will surrender."

"No, you won't. You think you will, but you won't. Don't deceive
yourself. I've been all through it. You _can't_ believe until some
fundamental change takes place in your mind. You must struggle just as
Richet did."

"Anyhow, let's turn the screws tighter. Let's devise some other plan to
make ourselves doubly certain of her part in the performance."

With this understanding I said good-night, and took my lonely way to my
apartment.

It was deliciously fresh and weirdly still in the street, and as I
looked up at the glowing stars and down the long, empty street my mind
revolted. "Can it be that the good old theory of the permanence of
matter is a gross and childish thing? Do the dead tell tales, after all?
I wish I could believe it. Perhaps old Tontonava was right. Perhaps if
we were all to pray for the happy hunting-grounds at the same moment
and in perfect faith, the lost paradise would return builded by the
simple power of our thought."

Then Richet's moving confession came to me: "It took me twenty years of
patient research to arrive at my present conviction. Nay (to make one
last confession), I am not yet absolutely and irremediably convinced. In
spite of the astounding phenomena which I have witnessed, I have still a
trace of doubt--doubt which is weak, indeed, to-day, but which may,
perchance, be stronger to-morrow. Yet such doubts, if they come, will
not be due so much to any defect in the actual experiment as to the
inexorable strength of prepossession which holds me back from adopting a
conclusion which contravenes the habitual and almost unanimous opinion
of mankind."

V

At this point the sittings, which had begun so interestingly, suddenly
began to fail of results. The power unaccountably weakened. Miller and
several others of the circle believed these failures to be due to the
increased rigidity of the restraint we had imp