those hours the persuasion was overwhelming in Mr. Bessel's
mind that presently his body would be killed by his furious tenant, and
he would have to remain in this shadow-land for evermore. So that
those long hours were a growing agony of fear. And ever as he hurried
to and fro in his ineffectual excitement, innumerable spirits of that
world about him mobbed him and confused his mind. And ever an envious
applauding multitude poured after their successful fellow as he went
upon his glorious career.

For that, it would seem, must be the life of these bodiless things of
this world that is the shadow of our world. Ever they watch, coveting
a way into a mortal body, in order that they may descend, as furies and
frenzies, as violent lusts and mad, strange impulses, rejoicing in the
body they have won. For Mr. Bessel was not the only human soul in that
place. Witness the fact that he met first one, and afterwards several
shadows of men, men like himself, it seemed, who had lost their bodies
even it may be as he had lost his, and wandered, despairingly, in that
lost world that is neither life nor death. They could not speak
because that world is silent, yet he knew them for men because of their
dim human bodies, and because of the sadness of their faces.

But how they had come into that world he could not tell, nor where the
bodies they had lost might be, whether they still raved about the
earth, or whether they were closed forever in death against return.
That they were the spirits of the dead neither he nor I believe. But
Doctor Wilson Paget thinks they are the rational souls of men who are
lost in madness on the earth.

At last Mr. Bessel chanced upon a place where a little crowd of such
disembodied silent creatures was gathered, and thrusting through them
he saw below a brightly-lit room, and four or five quiet gentlemen and
a woman, a stoutish woman dressed in black bombazine and sitting
awkwardly in a chair with her head thrown back. He knew her from her
portraits to be Mrs. Bullock, the medium. And he perceived that tracts
and structures in her brain glowed and stirred as he had seen the
pineal eye in the brain of Mr. Vincey glow. The light was very fitful;
sometimes it was a broad illumination, and sometimes merely a faint
twilight spot, and it shifted slowly about her brain. She kept on
talking and writing with one hand. And Mr. Bessel saw that the
crowding shadows of men about him, and a great multitude