communicating them to whoever has a few hours to spare for the purpose,
with the smallest trouble to himself in its perusal. I feel often that
my lack of skill is spoiling what might be a good story. That I cannot
help; and I write with the firm conviction that any effort on my part to
arrange these facts in such order that the tale should show dramatic
force, or startle him with unexpected issues of event, would only
procure derision for its writer, and might even obscure the only end he
has at heart, that of giving a complete grasp of the facts, as nearly as
may be in the order of their occurrence.

There is one feature in the story which the most skilful narrator might
easily fail to present as probable--the separation of these twin sisters
throughout a long lifetime, a separation contrary to nature; so much so,
indeed, that tales are told of twins living apart, the death or illness
of one of whom has brought about the death or similar illness of the
other. One would at least say that neither could die without knowledge
of the other; might even infer that either would go on thinking the
other living, without some direct evidence of death, some seeming
communication from the departed. But the separation of Phoebe from
Maisie did not come under these conditions; each was the victim of a
wicked fraud, carried out with a subtlety that might have deceived
Scotland Yard. There can be no doubt that it would have had the force to
obscure any phenomenon of a so-called telepathic nature, however vivid,
as proof that either twin was still alive; as the percipient, in the
belief that her sister's death was established beyond a doubt, would
unhesitatingly conclude that the departed had revisited earth, or had
made her presence felt by some process hard to understand from our side.

To see the story in its right light we must always keep in view the
extraordinary isolation of the penal settlement. All convict life is cut
off from the world, but in Van Diemen's Land even the freest of men out
on ticket-of-leave--free sometimes so long that the renewal of their
licence at its expiration became the merest form--was separated from the
land of his birth, even from the mainland of Australia, by a barrier for
him almost as impassable as the atmosphere that lies between us and the
visible land of the moon. Keep in mind the hundred-and-odd miles of
sea--are you sure you thought of it as so much?--that parts Tasmania
from the nearest poin