hod of
accounting for the extraordinary series of phenomena described by Miss
Martineau--that is, if the stories told to her can be relied upon.

Another possibility is that in some cases what have been taken for
soldiers were simply the nature-spirits themselves going through some
of the ordered evolutions in which they take so much delight, though
it must be admitted that these are rarely of a character which could
be mistaken for military manoeuvres except by the most ignorant.

The flocks of animals are probably in most instances mere records, but
there are cases where they, like the "wild huntsmen" of German story,
belong to an entirely different class of phenomena, which is
altogether outside of our present subject. Students of the occult
will be familiar with the fact that the circumstances surrounding any
scene of intense terror or passion, such as an exceptionally horrible
murder, are liable to be occasionally reproduced in a form which it
needs a very slight development of psychic faculty to be able to see
and it has sometimes happened that various animals formed part of such
surroundings, and consequently they also are periodically reproduced
by the action of the guilty conscience of the murderer (see _Manual
V._, p. 83).

Probably whatever foundation of fact underlies the various stories of
spectral horsemen and hunting-troops may generally be referred to this
category. This is also the explanation, evidently, of some of the
visions of ghostly armies, such as that remarkable re-enactment of the
battle of Edgehill which seems to have taken place at intervals for
some months after the date of the real struggle, as testified by a
justice of the peace, a clergyman, and other eye-witnesses, in a
curious contemporary pamphlet entitled _Prodigious Noises of War and
Battle, at Edgehill, near Keinton, in Northamptonshire_. According to
the pamphlet this case was investigated at the time by some officers
of the army, who clearly recognized many of the phantom figures that
they saw. This looks decidedly like an instance of the terrible power
of man's unrestrained passions to reproduce themselves, and to cause
in some strange way a kind of materialization of their record.

In some cases it is clear that the flocks of animals seen have been
simply hordes of unclean artificial elementals taking that form in
order to feed upon the loathsome emanations of peculiarly horrible
places, such as would be the site of a gallow