tuous and supercilious denial of the _facts_."

"I hold with you, Julian," said Owen. "Take for instance the
innumerable recorded instances where intimation has been given of a
friend's or relative's death by the simultaneous appearance of his image
to some one far absent, and unconscious even of his illness. There are
four ways of treating such stories--the first is to deny their truth,
which is, to say the least, not only grossly uncharitable, but an absurd
and impertinent caprice adopted in order to reject unpleasant evidence;
the second is to account for them by an optical delusion, accidentally
synchronising with the event, which seems to me a most monstrous
ignoring of the law of chances; a third is to account for them by the
existence of some exquisite faculty, (existing in different degrees of
intensity, and in some people not existing at all), whereby physical
impressions are invisibly conveyed by some mysterious sympathy of
organisation a faculty of which it seems to me there are the most
abundant traces, however much it may be sneered and jeered at by those
shallow philosophers who believe nothing but what they can grasp with
both hands: and a fourth is to suppose that spirits can, of their own
will, or by superior permission, make themselves sometimes visible to
human eyes."

"Or," said Julian, "so affect the senses _as to produce the impression_
that they are present to human eyes."

"And to show you, Lillyston," said Owen, "how little I fear any natural
explanations, and how much I think them beside the point, I'll tell you
what happened to me only the other night, and which yet does not make me
at all inclined to rationalise Hazlet's story. I had just put out the
candle in my bedroom, when over my head I saw a handwriting on the wall
in characters of light. I started out of bed, and for a moment fancied
that I could read the words, and that somebody had been playing me a
trick with phosphorus. But the next minute, I saw how it was; the
moonlight was shining in through the little muslin folds of the lower
blind, and as the folds were very symmetrical, the chequered reflection
on the wall looked exactly like a series of words."

"Well, now, that would have made a capital ghost story," said Lillyston,
"if you had been a little more imaginative and nervous. And still more
if the illusion had only been partially optical, and partly the result
of excited feelings."

"It matters nothing to me," said H