in a
complicated way. Thought transfer--audible to the person affected alone,
or even inaudible but perceptible like a thought--accounts for the whole
of Mrs. Piper's operations; she might have accomplices who would never be
seen speaking to her, and who would dictate actions, say, to one of the
Pelham or Howard family. These dictated actions, or inchoate plans, would
then be reported by Mrs. Piper writing as George Pelham. What Mrs. Piper
saw or felt or heard would be--at least at stated times--seen or felt or
heard by her fellow conspirators. As in conjuring everything found was
placed beforehand in the desired position. Thus facts recounted had been
induced. The blackguard who spoke to her as Phinuit was less educated
than the one who dictated George Pelham's communications.

Mrs. Piper's education was rather suited to receive the vulgar Phinuit's,
than the more refined pseudo Pelham's communications. But the progress
from the one stage so revolting to Miss Freer, to the other so
delightful, a sign of increased refinement to Mr. Myers, was hardly
more a change than the turning on a hot tap after a cold water tap into a
basin. The receptacle was the same. But as a strong hypnotist herself,
Mrs. Piper could bring off the Sutton matter; she could easily give Mrs.
Sutton visual hallucinations. The startling position taken up by Mr.
Myers in his article in the _National Review_, is easily explicable. He
and Dr. Hodgson were magnetised by Mrs. Piper, and were like wax in her
hands. Eusapia Palladius has the same power.

It is a sad declension in an eminent classic, that he, whose reference to
the primitive heathen Ulysses torturing the shade of his own mother is
rather revolting than elevating, should be full of wonder and delight at
it.

After all Ulysses was the worthy ancestor of many a pirate hanged at
Malta, more ferocious enemies of man than the Red Indian. Some
somnambulists should be perhaps protected from exploitation. Mrs. Piper's
trance is presumably feigned, as trances can easily be.

To return to Haunted Houses. In a haunted house case, a story suggested
by some chronological connection, or the nature of the apparition, is
attached to the phenomena. No doubt, in these days where the individuals
who perceive the phenomena have a wider experience, such a variety of
persons appear that the ghostly appearance loses its individuality
if not its authenticity. Mr. Podmore discusses such cases.[20] In Mr.
Podmore'