distinctly the insides of the houses as well as the
streets, saw little people dining and talking in the private houses,
men and women dining, playing billiards, and drinking in restaurants
and hotels, and several places of entertainment crammed with people.
It was like watching the affairs of a glass hive."

Such were Mr. Bessel's exact words as I took them down when he told me
the story. Quite forgetful of Mr. Vincey, he remained for a space
observing these things. Impelled by curiosity, he says, he stooped
down, and, with the shadowy arm he found himself possessed of,
attempted to touch a man walking along Vigo Street. But he could not
do so, though his finger seemed to pass through the man. Something
prevented his doing this, but what it was he finds it hard to describe.
He compares the obstacle to a sheet of glass.

"I felt as a kitten may feel," he said, "when it goes for the first
time to pat its reflection in a mirror." Again and again, on the
occasion when I heard him tell this story, Mr. Bessel returned to that
comparison of the sheet of glass. Yet it was not altogether a precise
comparison, because, as the reader will speedily see, there were
interruptions of this generally impermeable resistance, means of
getting through the barrier to the material world again. But,
naturally, there is a very great difficulty in expressing these
unprecedented impressions in the language of everyday experience.

A thing that impressed him instantly, and which weighed upon him
throughout all this experience, was the stillness of this place--he was
in a world without sound.

At first Mr. Bessel's mental state was an unemotional wonder. His
thought chiefly concerned itself with where he might be. He was out of
the body--out of his material body, at any rate--but that was not all.
He believes, and I for one believe also, that he was somewhere out of
space, as we understand it, altogether. By a strenuous effort of will
he had passed out of his body into a world beyond this world, a world
undreamt of, yet lying so close to it and so strangely situated with
regard to it that all things on this earth are clearly visible both
from without and from within in this other world about us. For a long
time, as it seemed to him, this realisation occupied his mind to the
exclusion of all other matters, and then he recalled the engagement
with Mr. Vincey, to which this astonishing experience was, after all,
but a prelude.

He