ually happened. They suspect me of some
discreditable adventure, but what sort of discreditable adventure they
suspect me of, I do not know. My aunt says she would forgive me if I
told her everything. I have--I have told her MORE than everything, and
still she is not satisfied. It would never do to let them know the truth
of the case, of course, and so I represent myself as having been waylaid
and gagged upon the beach. My aunt wants to know WHY they waylaid and
gagged me, why they took me away in their yacht. I do not know. Can
you suggest any reason? I can think of nothing. If, when you wrote, you
could write on TWO sheets so that I could show her one, and on that one
if you could show clearly that I really WAS in Jamaica this summer,
and had come there by being removed from a ship, it would be of great
service to me. It would certainly add to the load of my obligation
to you--a load that I fear I can never fully repay. Although if
gratitude..." And so forth. At the end he repeated his request for me to
burn the letter.

So the remarkable story of Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation ends. That breach
with his aunt was not of long duration. The old lady had forgiven him
before she died.

10. THE STOLEN BODY

Mr. Bessel was the senior partner in the firm of Bessel, Hart, and
Brown, of St. Paul's Churchyard, and for many years he was well known
among those interested in psychical research as a liberal-minded and
conscientious investigator. He was an unmarried man, and instead of
living in the suburbs, after the fashion of his class, he occupied rooms
in the Albany, near Piccadilly. He was particularly interested in the
questions of thought transference and of apparitions of the living, and
in November, 1896, he commenced a series of experiments in conjunction
with Mr. Vincey, of Staple Inn, in order to test the alleged possibility
of projecting an apparition of one's self by force of will through
space.

Their experiments were conducted in the following manner: At a
pre-arranged hour Mr. Bessel shut himself in one of his rooms in the
Albany and Mr. Vincey in his sitting-room in Staple Inn, and each then
fixed his mind as resolutely as possible on the other. Mr. Bessel
had acquired the art of self-hypnotism, and, so far as he could, he
attempted first to hypnotise himself and then to project himself as a
"phantom of the living" across the intervening space of nearly two miles
into Mr. Vincey's apartment. On several evenin