T-I. When told it was wrong, she added O. The
next were S-U-T; she gave S-U, and then wrongly R P Q, and finally T.
The next were N-A-R; she gave G N-A-S R. The following D-W-O she gave
D-W, but could not find the last letter. It is evident that every one
of the cards gave her fifty-two chances, and not more than one in
fifty-two would have been correct if it were only guessing, and as to
the letters, not more than one among twenty-six would have been chosen
correctly by chance. The given example demonstrates that of five cards
she gave three correctly, two half correctly, and those two mistakes
were rectified after the first wrong guess. The second experiment
demanded from her four times three letters. Of these twelve letters,
six were right at the first guess and five after one or two wrong
trials. Taking only this little list of card and letter experiments
together, we can say that the probabilities are only one to many
billions that such a result would ever come by chance.

Yet such correctness was not exceptional. On the contrary, I have no
series performed under these conditions which did not yield as
favourable an outcome as this. Some were even much more startling.
Once she gave six cards in succession correctly. It was no different
with word experiments. The printed word at which the sister and I
looked was stall; she spelled E S-T-O A-R I L-L. And when the word
was steam, she spelled L S-N K T-O A E-A-M; when it was glass, S G-L-R
A-S. Whenever a letter was wrong, she was told so and was allowed a
second or a third choice, but never more than three. It is evident
from these three illustrations that she gave the right letter in the
first place six times, and that the right letter was her second choice
four times, and her third choice three times, while no letter was
missed in three choices. Cases of this type again could never occur by
mere chance. The number of successful strokes in this last experiment
might be belittled by the claim that the last letters of the word were
guessed when the first letters had been found. But this was not the
case. First, even such a guess would have been chance. The word might
have been grave instead of grass, or star instead of stall. What is
much more important, however, is that a large number of other cases
proved that she was not aware of the words at all, but spelled the
letters without reference to their forming a word. Once I wrote
Chicago on a pad. The mother and sister