was it that there had come, mixed up with so much that might be
pertinent, such extraneous and grotesque things as Childe Harold, a hurt
knee, and Mother Goose?

I remember moving impatiently, and trying to argue myself into my
ordinary logical state of mind, but I know now that even then I was
wondering whether Sperry had found a hole in the ceiling upstairs.

I wandered, I recall, into the realm of the clairvoyant and the
clairaudient. Under certain conditions, such as trance, I knew that some
individuals claimed a power of vision that was supernormal, and I had at
one time lunched at my club with a well-dressed gentleman in a pince
nez who said the room was full of people I could not see, but who were
perfectly distinct to him. He claimed, and I certainly could not refute
him, that he saw further into the violet of the spectrum than the rest
of us, and seemed to consider it nothing unusual when an elderly woman,
whose description sounded much like my great-grand-mother, came and
stood behind my chair.

I recall that he said she was stroking my hair, and that following that
I had a distinctly creepy sensation along my scalp.

Then there were those who claimed that in trance the spirit of the
medium, giving place to a control, was free to roam whither it would,
and, although I am not sure of this, that it wandered in the fourth
dimension. While I am very vague about the fourth dimension, I did know
that in it doors and walls were not obstacles. But as they would not
be obstacles to a spirit, even in the world as we know it, that got me
nowhere.

Suppose Sperry came down and said Arthur Wells had been shot above the
ear, and that there was a second bullet hole in the ceiling? Added to
the key on the nail, a careless custom and surely not common, we would
have conclusive proof that our medium had been correct. There was
another point, too. Miss Jeremy had said, "Get the lather off his face."

That brought me up with a turn. Would a man stop shaving to kill
himself? If he did, why a revolver? Why not the razor in his hand?

I knew from my law experience that suicide is either a desperate impulse
or a cold-blooded and calculated finality. A man who kills himself while
dressing comes under the former classification, and will usually seize
the first method at hand. But there was something else, too. Shaving
is an automatic process. It completes itself. My wife has an irritated
conviction that if the house caught fire