g in of the slack; the outgoing line being controlled by a racket.
There was invariably one man at least, day and night, on the tower to
attend to it. At such an elevation there was always a strong wind, and
at times the kite rose to an enormous height, as well as travelling for
great distances laterally. In fact, the kite became, in a short time,
one of the curiosities of Castra Regis and all around it. Edgar began to
attribute to it, in his own mind, almost human qualities. It became to
him a separate entity, with a mind and a soul of its own. Being idle-
handed all day, he began to apply to what he considered the service of
the kite some of his spare time, and found a new pleasure--a new object
in life--in the old schoolboy game of sending up "runners" to the kite.
The way this is done is to get round pieces of paper so cut that there is
a hole in the centre, through which the string of the kite passes. The
natural action of the wind-pressure takes the paper along the string, and
so up to the kite itself, no matter how high or how far it may have gone.

In the early days of this amusement Edgar Caswall spent hours. Hundreds
of such messengers flew along the string, until soon he bethought him of
writing messages on these papers so that he could make known his ideas to
the kite. It may be that his brain gave way under the opportunities
given by his illusion of the entity of the toy and its power of separate
thought. From sending messages he came to making direct speech to the
kite--without, however, ceasing to send the runners. Doubtless, the
height of the tower, seated as it was on the hill-top, the rushing of the
ceaseless wind, the hypnotic effect of the lofty altitude of the speck in
the sky at which he gazed, and the rushing of the paper messengers up the
string till sight of them was lost in distance, all helped to further
affect his brain, undoubtedly giving way under the strain of beliefs and
circumstances which were at once stimulating to the imagination,
occupative of his mind, and absorbing.

The next step of intellectual decline was to bring to bear on the main
idea of the conscious identity of the kite all sorts of subjects which
had imaginative force or tendency of their own. He had, in Castra Regis,
a large collection of curious and interesting things formed in the past
by his forebears, of similar tastes to his own. There were all sorts of
strange anthropological specimens, both old and new,