to Schumann meant in the first
instance, for 'E. A.' was unable to complete his sentence, which should
have read: '_Have Schumann return a certain etude which I took.--E. A._'
Furthermore, the psychic evidently believed in the truth of the message
or she would not have gone into it with such particularity; she would
have been lacking in caution to have given me such definite and detailed
information, knowing that it was all false.

"So far as my own mind is concerned, I had no knowledge of such a music
publisher as Schumann. Smart I had met. Blake, however, knew of both
firms. The entire message and the method of its communication were
deeply exciting at the time, and completed what seemed like a highly
intellectual test of identity, and we both left the house of the psychic
with a feeling of having been very near to our dead friend.

"'To identify one of these bars of music would be a good test,' said
Blake, 'but to find that _etude_ at Schumann's would be a triumph.'

"'To find the manuscript fragment would be still more convincing,' was
my answer.

"Imagine my disappointment when, in answer to my inquiry, Schumann
replied that no such _etude_ had ever been in his hands, and Alexander's
family reported that no fragment called 'Unghere' could be found among
the composer's manuscripts."

Fowler shared my regret. "What about the other messages? Were they all
disappointing?"

"No; some of them were not. The most intimate were true; and a signature
which came on the slate under test conditions, and which I valued very
little at the moment, turned out to be almost the exact duplicate of
Alexander's signature as he used to write it when a youth twenty years
ago. As a matter of fact, it closely resembled the signature appended to
a framed letter which used to hang upon the wall of his study. But, even
so, its reproduction under these conditions is sufficiently puzzling."

"What was Blake's conclusion? Did he put the same value upon it all that
you did?"

"Yes, I think he was quite as deeply impressed as I. He said the music
seemed like Alexander's music, somehow distorted by the medium through
which it came. 'It was like seeing Alexander through a pane of crinkly
glass,' he put it. And he added: 'I had the sense of being in
long-distance contact with the composer himself.' He had no doubt of the
supernormal means through which our writing came, but he remains
doubtful of the value of the music as evidence of 'Ernest