t the floor. I saw fainter images of the image passing continually
from where it crawled to the man in his bed, and I asked the evoker of
spirits what they were. He said, 'They are the images of his terror.'
Presently the man in the conical cap began to speak, but who heard him I
cannot remember. He made the sick man get out of bed and walk, leaning
upon him, and in much terror till they came to the cellar. There the man
in the conical cap made some symbol over the image, which fell back as if
asleep, and putting a knife into the other's hand he said, 'I have taken
from it the magical life, but you must take from it the life you gave.'
Somebody saw the sick man stoop and sever the head of the image from its
body, and then fall as if he had given himself a mortal wound, for he had
filled it with his own life. And then the vision changed and fluttered,
and he was lying sick again in the room up-stairs. He seemed to lie there
a long time with the man in the conical cap watching beside him, and then,
I cannot remember how, the evoker of spirits discovered that though he
would in part recover, he would never be well, and that the story had got
abroad in the town and shattered his good name. His pupils had left him
and men avoided him. He was accursed. He was a magician.

The story was finished, and I looked at my acquaintance. He was white and
awestruck. He said, as nearly as I can remember, 'All my life I have seen
myself in dreams making a man by some means like that. When I was a child
I was always thinking out contrivances for galvanizing a corpse into
life.' Presently he said, 'Perhaps my bad health in this life comes from
that experiment.' I asked if he had read _Frankenstein_, and he answered
that he had. He was the only one of us who had, and he had taken no part
in the vision.

III

Then I asked to have some past life of mine revealed, and a new evocation
was made before the tablet full of little squares. I cannot remember so
well who saw this or that detail, for now I was interested in little but
the vision itself. I had come to a conclusion about the method. I knew
that the vision may be in part common to several people.

A man in chain armour passed through a castle door, and the seeress
noticed with surprise the bareness and rudeness of castle rooms. There was
nothing of the magnificence or the pageantry she had expected. The man
came to a large hall and to a little chapel opening out of it, where a
ceremon