at least under
conviction that the liberation of the astral self was possible (if at
all) only in the deepest trance, and I now attempted to discover by
interrogation of Mrs. Smiley precisely what her own conception of the
process was.

"You told me once that you are conscious of leaving your body when in
trance," I said. "Do you always have that sensation?"

"Yes, I almost always have a feeling of floating in the air," she
answered. "It often seems as if I had risen a few feet above and a
little to one side of my material self, to which I am somehow attached.
I can see my body and what goes on around it, and yet, somehow, it all
seems kind of dim, like a dream. It's hard to tell you just what I mean,
but I seem to be in both places at once."

"Do you ever have any perception of a physical connection between
yourself and the sitters?"

She seemed to me to answer this a bit reluctantly. "Yes, I sometimes
feel as though little shining threads went out from me and those in the
circle, and sometimes these threads meet and twine themselves around the
cone or the pencil. This means that I draw power from all my sitters."

This was in accord with the accounts of a "cobwebby feeling" which both
Maxwell and Flammarion had drawn from their mediums. Maxwell makes much
of this curious physical sensation which accompanied certain of M.
Meurice's phenomena. Here also seemed to be an unconscious corroboration
of Albert de Rochas's experiments in the "externalization of motivity,"
as he calls it. The "cobwebby feeling" of the fingers might mean an
actual raying-out of some subtle form of matter. Indeed, M. Meurice,
Maxwell's medium, declared he could see "a sheath of filaments pass from
his fingers to the objects of experimentation."

"Tell us about your journeys into the spirit land," I suggested. "You
sometimes seem to go far away, do you not?"

Her voice became very wistful as she complied. "Yes, sometimes I seem to
go to a far-off, bright world. I don't always want to come back, but
there is a little shining white ribbon that unites my spirit with my
body and holds me fast. Once when I had resolved never to return, that
little band of light began to tug at me, and, although it broke my heart
to leave my children, who were there with me, I yielded, and came back
to life. It was very cheerful and lovely in that land, and I hated to
come back to the cold and cruel earth-plane."

"Can't you tell us about it more particularly?"