my wishes, but could not.
Twice the horn rose from the carpet, only to fall back helplessly.
Fowler placed it in position each time, marking each new position,
while I took note of the convulsive tremor which swept from time to time
over the psychic. It was exactly as if she were a dynamo generating some
unknown electrical energy, which, after accumulating for a time in her
organism (as in a jar), was discharged along the direction of our will,
and yet I could not detect any marked synchronism of movement between
these impulses and the movement of the horn.

After each fall of the cone she moaned and writhed, _but not till the
hush of death came over her did the horn move_. So intense was the
silence each time that we could hear the slightest breath, the minutest
movement of the tin as it scraped along the rug.

"It is useless to talk of a confederate," I remarked; "it is of no value
to refer this action to the hands of the psychic. We must look to
subtler causes for this phenomenon. Perhaps Maxwell's theory that some
magnetic power is liberated by the contraction of the larger muscles
will account for it, but in no other way."

At last the megaphone soared into the air, passed over our heads, and
dropped gently upon the table. It did not fall with a bang; on the
contrary, it seemed to descend gently--_as if under perfect control of
both hand and eye_. And yet I assert there was nothing to indicate that
the psychic shared in these movements. She lay as still as a corpse.
Nothing but a minute continuous tremor in the thread told that she was
still alive. I was enormously impressed by the silence. The darkness
seemed athrill with mystery--not the mystery of the discarnate soul, but
the mystery of the X-ray. I felt that we were ourselves involved in a
production of each and every one of these movements.

"There is no use attempting to deny this fact," I insisted to the other
sitters. "Either the psychic is able to control that cone by the
exercise of her will over some unknown invisible force, or she has left
her body and is now at work, a sentient entity in the air about us.
There is the same precision in all this which Lombroso observed. It
really seems that the medium has the faculty of using her senses at a
distance. To say that she is handling that cone with her ordinary
physical limbs is absurd. This single inexplicable moving of a mass of
matter from A to B makes the experiments of Crookes and Maxwell very
much