n obvious to the senses. Another parallel would be that of a
sleep-walking artist who should when in a state of somnambulism execute
a picture. But neither case would be identical in principle with mine.
The artist and the mathematician would both have executed in their sleep
what they had laid the foundation of when awake. I, on the other hand,
would, should I transfer my aerial sitter to canvas, simply paint what I
saw when wide awake, just as in undertaking to reproduce any other face
from memory, whether observed once for twenty seconds or frequently and
for longer periods.

It is usual to explain the common stories of phantoms by attributing
them to ocular illusion, aided or not aided by the imagination or by
particular conditions of the bodily or mental health. The eye, of
course, is never quite proof against deception, but there needs some
little material for it; and in my case there was absolutely none--no
waving sheet or trees or clouds, nothing but the printed page; and that
was visible, unchanged except by the utterly inharmonious and contrasted
image before it. My imagination was not affected before, at the time, or
after. My pulse may have been a little quickened for the moment, for I
did not accept the appearance as a matter of course, as we do
everything, however preposterous, in a dream, but, on the contrary,
quite recognized its abnormal character. I know of no existing cause of
especial or temporary liability to any delusion of the kind. In short,
though I have not--and had not when I continued after the disappearance
to contemplate, without moving a muscle, the book against which the head
had been projected, and coolly reflect upon what I had seen--the
slightest belief that it was supernatural, I should be compelled, if
called on in court, to swear that I had seen what must be provisionally
named a spectre. "If I stand here, I saw it!"

E. C. B.

THE BIRTHPLACE OF "GEORGE ELIOT."

As the traveller is whirled along over the great stretch of railway
between Liverpool and London, he passes (about midway) through Nuneaton,
a busy little manufacturing town, situated in a most delightful and
fruitful part of the "Garden Land." About two miles from this town
(which the gifted authoress has dubbed "Milby" in her _Scenes of
Clerical Life_), on the broad smooth highway leading to the ancient and
renowned city of Coventry, stands the house where Marian Evans was born.
It is a large brick building, sur