es,
and was always dressed in a simple, artistic fashion. A few months after
our return to England I saw in the papers the death of this pretty
child; for she was little more at the time. I wrote a letter of
condolence and sympathy, which was at once answered by the aunt in very
kind fashion; and since then I have seen nothing to remind me of Lily
until this last year has brought her once more within my ken. I am only
too thankful to realise that any influence so pure and beautiful as
hers, may be around me sometimes in my daily life.

* * * * *

And now let me say, in the words of our great novelist:

"Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is
played out!"

Only I trust in this case we have managed to rise a little above the
usual atmosphere of Vanity Fair.

Surely the aim of all psychic research should be to give us a
_scientific_, as we have already, thank God, a spiritual, foundation for
the "Hope that is in us."

Spirit photographs and spirit materialisations and abnormal visions or
abnormal sounds amount to very little, if we look upon them as an end
in themselves, and not as the symbols and the earnest of those greater
things which "Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither hath it entered
into the heart of _man_ to conceive."

I remember, years ago, in the course of a deeply interesting
conversation with Phillipps Brooks, the late Bishop of Massachusetts,
that I asked him what he thought about modern theosophy, which was just
then becoming a _culte_ in his native town of Boston. There was a great
deal of talk at the time about the new philosophy and the wonderful
phenomena said to accompany its propaganda. Sir Edwin Arnold had written
his "Light of Asia," and Oliver Wendell Holmes had welcomed it with
wondering awe, as something approaching a new revelation. And smaller
people were talking about the historical Blavatsky tea-cups, and hidden
heirlooms found in Indian gardens, and some of us were wondering how
soon we should learn to fly, and what would come next.

The bishop's answer to my question was so genial, so characteristic, and
showed such divine common-sense!

"It is not a question of _flying_," he said. "I should like to fly as
much as anybody; and a queer sort of bird I should appear!" (He was well
over six feet, and broad in proportion.)

"If you suddenly found you could fly," he continued, "it would be
_absorbing_ on Monday morn