he table for breakfast. As I had passed her I had been telling myself one
of those long foolish tales which one tells only to oneself. If something
had happened that had not happened, I would have hurt my arm, I thought. I
saw myself with my arm in a sling in the middle of some childish
adventures. I returned with the newspaper and met my host and hostess in
the door. The moment they saw me they cried out, 'Why, the _bonne_ has
just told us you had your arm in a sling. We thought something must have
happened to you last night, that you had been run over maybe'--or some
such words. I had been dining out at the other end of Paris, and had come
in after everybody had gone to bed. I had cast my imagination so strongly
upon the servant that she had seen it, and with what had appeared to be
more than the mind's eye.

One afternoon, about the same time, I was thinking very intently of a
certain fellow-student for whom I had a message, which I hesitated about
writing. In a couple of days I got a letter from a place some hundreds of
miles away where that student was. On the afternoon when I had been
thinking so intently I had suddenly appeared there amid a crowd of people
in a hotel and as seeming solid as if in the flesh. My fellow-student had
seen me, but no one else, and had asked me to come again when the people
had gone. I had vanished, but had come again in the middle of the night
and given the message. I myself had no knowledge of casting an
imagination upon one so far away.

I could tell of stranger images, of stranger enchantments, of stranger
imaginations, cast consciously or unconsciously over as great distances by
friends or by myself, were it not that the greater energies of the mind
seldom break forth but when the deeps are loosened. They break forth amid
events too private or too sacred for public speech, or seem themselves, I
know not why, to belong to hidden things. I have written of these
breakings forth, these loosenings of the deep, with some care and some
detail, but I shall keep my record shut. After all, one can but bear
witness less to convince him who won't believe than to protect him who
does, as Blake puts it, enduring unbelief and misbelief and ridicule as
best one may. I shall be content to show that past times have believed as
I do, by quoting Joseph Glanvil's description of the Scholar Gipsy. Joseph
Glanvil is dead, and will not mind unbelief and misbelief and ridicule.

The Scholar Gipsy, too, is