om the moment he turned off his light his mind leaped into
the most restless activity. Taking up the scroll of the night's
events, he read and reread it with minutest care. A voice seemed to
present the girl's case, arguing that she had no conscious part in the
manifestations. "It is possible for one in deep trance to rise and
manipulate horns, bells, and guitars at the suggestion of another
precisely as a somnambulist walks without intention of wrong-doing,
without conscious knowledge of what is being done. She might have had
a veritable hand in to-night's drama and still be innocent. Hypnotism
is now pretty thoroughly proven--and to Clarke you must look for the
real offender.

"The human brain, which is marvellous enough when in health and
singing merrily forward like a cunningly constructed and jewelled
time-piece, becomes, in disease, as baffling, as hopeless of solution
as the laws of the unfathomable sky. Beyond the utmost sweep of the
imagined lies the marvel of fact. The beliefs, the vagaries, the
hallucinations of the insane have never been co-ordinated, perhaps
they never will be. It is possible that this girl, so normal in
appearance, has a rotten strand in her--some weakness inherited from
her father. This is the only way in which to account for her glowing
physical health and her manifest mental disorder. She has her father's
mind in a body drawn from her mother. One-half of her is pure and
sweet and girlish, the other is old, decayed, lying, and
irresponsible. Can she be reclaimed?

"It is now known that the conscious mind is but a pin's-point of the
mind's activity, the conscious state being but one of an infinite number
of possible states--that the submerged, unconscious self is a million
times more complex than the chain of those conscious states which makes
up the normal or orderly life of an individual. May it not be that this
girl, by reason of her long practice of submission--induced by
others--has dethroned her conscious, higher self, making of her
subliminal self a tyrant? This submerged self, holding, as it does, all
the experiences of the dark past, all the lusts, deceits, and
subterfuges, all the cruelties and shameless potentialities of her
animal and semicivilized forebears, and being but a mass of discordant
impulses--states almost entirely disassociated from her conscious
life--has all but taken possession of her higher self. The restraint of
the later-developed, governing, moral self bei