g gives us a very good example of the kind of
vision most frequently seen in this way. "I had given a glass ball,"
he says, "to a young lady, Miss Baillie, who had scarcely any success
with it. She lent it to Miss Leslie, who saw a large square,
old-fashioned red sofa covered with muslin, which she found in the
next country-house she visited. Miss Baillie's brother, a young
athlete, laughed at these experiments, took the ball into the study,
and came back looking 'gey gash.' He admitted that he had seen a
vision--somebody he knew under a lamp. He would discover during the
week whether he saw right or not. This was at 5.30 on a Sunday
afternoon.

"On Tuesday, Mr. Baillie was at a dance in a town some forty miles
from his home, and met a Miss Preston. 'On Sunday,' he said, 'about
half-past five you were sitting under a standard lamp in a dress I
never saw you wear, a blue blouse with lace over the shoulders,
pouring out tea for a man in blue serge, whose back was towards me, so
that I only saw the tip of his moustache.'

"'Why, the blinds must have been up,' said Miss Preston.

"'I was at Dulby,' said Mr. Baillie, and he undeniably was."

This is quite a typical case of crystal-gazing--the picture correct in
every detail, you see, and yet absolutely unimportant and bearing no
apparent signification of any sort to either party, except that it
served to prove to Mr. Baillie that there was something in
crystal-gazing. Perhaps more frequently the visions tend to be of a
romantic character--men in foreign dress, or beautiful though
generally unknown landscapes.

Now what is the rationale of this kind of clairvoyance? As I have
indicated above, it belongs usually to the "astral-current" type, and
the crystal or other object simply acts as a focus for the will-power
of the seer, and a convenient starting-point for his astral tube.
There are some who can influence what they will see by their will,
that is to say they have the power of pointing their telescope as they
wish; but the great majority just form a fortuitous tube and see
whatever happens to present itself at the end of it.

Sometimes it may be a scene comparatively near at hand, as in the case
just quoted; at other times it will be a far-away Oriental landscape;
at others yet it may be a reflection of some fragment of an akashic
record, and then the picture will contain figures in some antique
dress, and the phenomenon belongs to our third large division of
"cla