le than the above story is that sent me by my old school
friend Martin Tristram, who died last year.

I style it "The Case of Martin Tristram." It is reproduced from a
magazine published some three years ago.

After Martin Tristram once took up spiritualism his visits to me became
most erratic, and I not only never knew when to expect him, but I was
not always sure, when he did come, that it was he.

This sounds extraordinary--to see a man is assuredly to recognize him!
Not always--by no means always!

There are circumstances in which a man loses his identity, when his
"ego" is supplanted by another ego, when he ceases to be himself, and
assumes an individuality which is entirely different from himself.

This is undoubtedly the case in madness, imbecility, epilepsy, so-called
total loss of memory through cerebral injury, hypnotism, sometimes in
projection when the astral body gets detained, and also not infrequently
in investigating peculiar instances of psychic phenomena.

But if the astral body has been evicted from its carnal home, whither
has it gone? and what is the nature of the thing that has taken its
place?

Ah! These are indeed puzzles--puzzles I am devoting a lifetime to solve.

There have been moments when unseen hands have gradually begun to pull
aside the obscuring veil, when the identity of the usurping spirit has
seemed on the verge of being disclosed to me, and I have been about to
be initiated into the greatest and most zealously guarded of all
secrets.

There have been times, I say, when my occult researches have actually
brought me to this climax; but up to the present I have invariably been
disappointed--the curtain has suddenly fallen, the esoteric ego has
shrunk into its shell, and the mystery surrounding it has remained
impenetrable.

This is but one, albeit perhaps the most striking, of the many methods
through which the superphysical endeavours to get in immediate contact
with the physical.

I was unpleasantly reminded of it when Martin Tristram's carnal body
came to visit me one night several years ago. I was aware that it was
not Tristram. His mannerisms were the same, his voice had not altered;
but there was an expression in his eyes that told of a very different
spirit from Martin's dwelling within that body.

The night being cold, he closed the door carefully, and crossing the
room to where I sat by the fire, threw himself in an easy chair, and
gazed meditatively at me.

M