he was taken to the house
of Dr. Hatton in Upper Baker Street. Here he was subjected to a
sedative treatment, and anything that might recall the violent crisis
through which he had passed was carefully avoided. But on the second
day he volunteered a statement.

Since that occasion Mr. Bessel has several times repeated this
statement--to myself among other people--varying the details as the
narrator of real experiences always does, but never by any chance
contradicting himself in any particular. And the statement he makes is
in substance as follows.

In order to understand it clearly it is necessary to go back to his
experiments with Mr. Vincey before his remarkable attack. Mr. Bessel's
first attempts at self-projection, in his experiments with Mr. Vincey,
were, as the reader will remember, unsuccessful. But through all of
them he was concentrating all his power and will upon getting out of
the body--"willing it with all my might," he says. At last, almost
against expectation, came success. And Mr. Bessel asserts that he,
being alive, did actually, by an effort of will, leave his body and
pass into some place or state outside this world.

The release was, he asserts, instantaneous. "At one moment I was
seated in my chair, with my eyes tightly shut, my hands gripping the
arms of the chair, doing all I could to concentrate my mind on Vincey,
and then I perceived myself outside my body--saw my body near me, but
certainly not containing me, with the hands relaxing and the head
drooping forward on the breast."

Nothing shakes him in his assurance of that release. He describes in a
quiet, matter-of-fact way the new sensation he experienced. He felt he
had become impalpable--so much he had expected, but he had not expected
to find himself enormously large. So, however, it would seem he
became. "I was a great cloud--if I may express it that way--anchored
to my body. It appeared to me, at first, as if I had discovered a
greater self of which the conscious being in my brain was only a little
part. I saw the Albany and Piccadilly and Regent Street and all the
rooms and places in the houses, very minute and very bright and
distinct, spread out below me like a little city seen from a balloon.
Every now and then vague shapes like drifting wreaths of smoke made the
vision a little indistinct, but at first I paid little heed to them.
The thing that astonished me most, and which astonishes me still, is
that I saw quite