e been
deceived."

"Are _you_ the only one competent to study these facts?" asked Brierly,
hotly. "The egotism of you professional physicists is a kind of
insanity. The moment a man like Richet or Lombroso admits a knowledge of
one of these occult facts, you who have no experience in the same
phenomena jump on him like so many wolves. Such bigotry is unworthy a
scientist."

"Would you have us accept the word of any one man when that word
contradicts the experience of all mankind?" asked Miller.

"Listen to what Richet says in confession of _his_ perplexity," I called
out, soothingly. "He writes: 'It took me twenty years 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 during my sixty experiments with
Eusapia, I have still a trace of doubt. _Certainty does not follow on
demonstration; it follows on habit._' So don't blame Miller or myself
for inability to believe in these theories, for our minds are the kind
that accept the mystical with sore struggle."

"Go on with Eusapia's career," said Harris. "I am interested in her. I
want the story of the investigations."

"Her story broadens," I resumed. "Her fame spread throughout Europe, and
squad after squad of militant scientists grappled with her, each one
perfectly sure that he was the one to unmask her to the world. She was
called before kings and emperors, and everywhere she triumphed--save in
Cambridge, where she made a partial failure; but she redeemed herself
later with both Lodge and Myers, so that it remains true to say that she
has gone surely from one success to another and greater triumph."

"But there have been other such careers--Slade's and Home's, for
instance--which ended in disaster."

"True, but nothing like her courage has ever been known. The crowning
wonder of her career came when she consented to enter the special
laboratories of the universities of Genoa and Naples. It is in the
writings of Morselli, Professor of Psychology at Genoa, and in the
reports of Bottazzi, head of the Department of Physics at Naples, that
scepticism, such as my own, is met and conquered. I defy Miller or any
man of open mind to read the detailed story of these marvellous
experiments and deny the existence of the basic phenomena produced by
Eusapia Paladino."

"You speak with warmth," said Harris.

"I do. I am at this moment fresh fr