tlived the body. He awaited the magical work full of scepticism. He
expected nothing more than an air of romance, an illusion as of the stage,
that might capture the consenting imagination for an hour. The evoker of
spirits and his beautiful wife received us in a little house, on the edge
of some kind of garden or park belonging to an eccentric rich man, whose
curiosities he arranged and dusted, and he made his evocation in a long
room that had a raised place on the floor at one end, a kind of dais, but
was furnished meagrely and cheaply. I sat with my acquaintance in the
middle of the room, and the evoker of spirits on the dais, and his wife
between us and him. He held a wooden mace in his hand, and turning to a
tablet of many-coloured squares, with a number on each of the squares,
that stood near him on a chair, he repeated a form of words. Almost at
once my imagination began to move of itself and to bring before me vivid
images that, though never too vivid to be imagination, as I had always
understood it, had yet a motion of their own, a life I could not change or
shape. I remember seeing a number of white figures, and wondering whether
their mitred heads had been suggested by the mitred head of the mace, and
then, of a sudden, the image of my acquaintance in the midst of them. I
told what I had seen, and the evoker of spirits cried in a deep voice,
'Let him be blotted out,' and as he said it the image of my acquaintance
vanished, and the evoker of spirits or his wife saw a man dressed in black
with a curious square cap standing among the white figures. It was my
acquaintance, the seeress said, as he had been in a past life, the life
that had moulded his present, and that life would now unfold before us. I
too seemed to see the man with a strange vividness. The story unfolded
itself chiefly before the mind's eye of the seeress, but sometimes I saw
what she described before I heard her description. She thought the man in
black was perhaps a Fleming of the sixteenth century, and I could see him
pass along narrow streets till he came to a narrow door with some rusty
ironwork above it. He went in, and wishing to find out how far we had one
vision among us, I kept silent when I saw a dead body lying upon the table
within the door. The seeress described him going down a long hall and up
into what she called a pulpit, and beginning to speak. She said, 'He is a
clergyman, I can hear his words. They sound like Low Dutch.' Then af