he got me involved in apparent contradictions--you have no
idea how easy it is, when you are trying to be very lucid--and then he
changed the subject with the remark that I was a very poor witness.

It was about this time that I began to lose my temper. It was after
three o'clock when we got to that point, and I was getting very
tired, and, strange as it may appear, curiously doubtful about my own
existence. I had for some time been coming to the conclusion that he did
not quite believe in my reality; and after he had dismissed my account
of the black races as being untrustworthy, he said, half to himself,
that quite probably I was nothing more than an hallucination, a
thought projection of his own mind. And after that I got more and more
annoyed--partly, I think, because I had a kind of haunting fear that
what he had said might be true. When you have been talking to a spirit
for over three hours in the middle of the night, you are liable to doubt
anything.

But it was foolish of me to try and prove to him that I had a real
objective existence, because obviously it wasn't possible. I tried to
touch him, and my hand went through him as if he were nothing more than
a patch of mist. Then I got right out of bed and moved various articles
about the room, but, as he said, that proved nothing, for if he had an
hallucination about me, he might equally well have one about the things
I appeared to move. And then we drifted into a futile argument as to
what I looked like.

It began as a sort of test, to try if my own conception of myself
tallied with his; and it didn't--not in the very least. In fact, the
description he gave of me would have done very well for the typical
goblin of fairy-tale, which, as I told him, was precisely how _I_ saw
_him_. He laughed at that, and told me that, as a matter of fact, he had
no shape at all, and that my conception of him proved his description of
me was the correct one, because I had visualised myself. He said that he
would appear to me in any shape that I happened to be thinking of, and
naturally I should be thinking of my own. And I could not disprove a
thing he said; and when I looked at myself in the cheval glass, I was
not at all sure that I did not look like the traditional goblin.

Well, I assure you that I felt just then as if the one possible way left
to demonstrate my sanity, my very existence, was to lose my temper;
and I did it very thoroughly. I raved up and down the room, kno