above the shoulder. What it more probably implies is that in the trance state there is a dual control and an awareness on the part of the conscious of the activities, in certain directions, of the socalled unconscious self. On this point, however, we are still awaiting expert psychological evidence.

As to (2), the conditions on the spirit plane, the evidence is so extraordinarily contradicting that in my opinion only one hypothesis can account for it namely, that the condition of the spirit after death, perhaps for some years as we reckon time, is one of illusion. I have dealt with this elsewhere and have no space for the necessary argument in this article, but the essential points of the theory are that the spirit creates its own environment on that plane, and that we can no more expect any typical, much less a universally applicable, description of life on the other side than could an inhabitant of Mars who cross-examined witnesses of earthly conditions taken successively from New York, Thibet, and the Malay Archipelago. And if this be so we can understand both why we so often receive an account of life on the spirit plane couched in physical images, and why we are far too ready to assume that the communicating spirits could be far more convincing if they wished to be. For, on this hypothesis, the powers of these spirits are very definitely limited by their earth experiences. (I may add that since I first began to adopt this theory, soon after the publication of Sir Oliver Lodge's Raymond, I have found in it a wonderful key to many of the perplexities associated with this class of phenomena).

Our second criticism of the Drayton Thomas "Times tests" must necessarily deal with that terrible bugbear, telepathy, between the living. Would it be possible to account for the mystery by this means? We may begin by ruling out the possibility that either Mr. Thomas or the medium, Mrs. Leonard, could have had access to the material—

the impossibility, in other words, that the names and facts given together with their positions on the front page of the Times could have been known by any normal physical process either to their conscious or unconscious minds. That possibility could only in this case be accounted for by a long and elaborate process of fraud which is quite inconceivable. (Apart altogether from the character of the chief persons concerned, there are purely mechanical difficulties to be overcome-involving confederacy with some employee in the Times officewhich seem to me to put any charge of deliberate fraud completely out of the question.)

But the application of the telepathic theory goes much deeper than this, for, according to the modern method, we are not permitted to exclude the possibility of telepathy when the material is known to any living mind. Now, in the case under consideration, detail of the contents of the newspaper page to which reference is made was obviously in the consciousness of many minds at the time of the sittings. Thus, particulars of the announcements in question would be known to those who sent them up for insertion, and to the clerks who received and classified them. The almost equally essential point of the position on the page, however, could not be known to these people; but this also would have been known in some cases to the compositors and typographers at the time of the sittings. Inquiry at the Times office elicited the information from the manager that the work of setting these advertisements is begun at 5 P.M.; but in a further letter with reference to a particular instance, he writes that the copy for the announcement in question had been set up "some considerable time" before the hour of the sitting, four to five o'clock. Another interesting point in this connection is that at a sitting on December 4, 1919, taken at the unusually early hour of twelve, noon, the name Hutchinson was given by the communicator as appearing "about two inches

from the bottom" of the first column. This name was found next day by Mr. Thomas at the top of the second column, a fact conveying the suggestion that extra matter had later been inserted in front of it, necessitating its transference from the bottom of one file to the top of the next.

No doubt this examination should be pushed much farther and a careful comparison made; but even from the material at present available, it seems possible that in some cases the exact position of the announcement on the page was not known to any living being when the message was received-a conclusion that considerably complicates the whole problem, since it appears to involve the power of accurate prophecy on the part of the communicating spirit. Personally, I should prefer to relegate the criticism of telepathy to other grounds, for, in my opinion, the theory of telepathy, if used to account for such a case as this, must be stretched beyond all credibility. My difficulty, taking this instance as more or less typical, is that there is no kind of sympathy or rapport between the minds of Mr. Thomas or Mrs. Leonard and a perfectly unknown compositor or printer in the Times office; and we have therefore to assume, in the first place, that the extra sensitive mind of a medium in trance can select its information at will from any possible source. What does this imply? I can see nothing for it but to postulate that the momentarily released spirit of Mrs. Leonard was able to get into communication with the thoughts of certain previously unknown operatives at the Times offices, and meticulously choose from those thoughts a few particular names and phrases and their precise position on the forms for the next day's paper. Furthermore, she must at the same time have been in communication with the minds of Mr. Thomas and occasionally of new sitters that he brought with him, inasmuch as the particular names she had to select had a special application to the sitters and were in a great many cases unknown to her conscious mind.

VOL. CXLIV.-No. 862.-61

Well, I can only say that of the two hypotheses I should prefer, from the points of view of ordinary reason and common sense, to accept that of a communicating spirit endowed with supernormal powers in some directions, particularly in this direction of "sensing" certain information. It seems to me the lesser miracle. Moreover, if we accept the telepathy hypothesis in such a connection as this, does it not practically commit us to the theory of survival? If we grant such amazing capabilities to the spirit of a medium, temporarily released from the control of the entranced consciousness, we can hardly deny the probability that it is capable of a separate life of its own. If we are to credit the subconscious personality (or whatever we like to call it) with all kinds of supernormal powers, including that of temporary separation from the body and independent function, we in no way explain the wonder by talking about telepathy. Yet I can find no alternative to the positing of these supernormal powers if we are to account for the phenomena just examined by any theory of thought transference. If such transference as this were conceivable between conscious minds, the world would, indeed, become a very queer place to live in.

In conclusion, I would submit that these Times tests constitute new and exceedingly valuable evidence in this inquiry. The facts are open to challenge and investigation, and I, at least, am fully convinced that no charge of trickery or fraud could be upheld for five minutes. I do not suggest for a moment that, taken by themselves, these phenomena would convince a determined skeptic. Most skeptics are so very determined! But, taken in conjunction with the rapidly increasing body of evidence, I claim that this Drayton Thomas case furnishes a piece of testimony that is very hard to combat. It is not so sensational as the materializations of Marthe Beraud and Katherine Goligher, but from our standpoint it is far more essential.

R

OSIE PONT had been chicken girl at Wait's Farm for a little over five years, which meant, as anyone who saw her round, sweet, childish face would know, that she had started her career at an early age. Mrs. Pont was a believer in early beginnings a wise and practical belief in the mother of eleven children. All the little Ponts had been sent early to school, to be out of her way in her mornings of cooking and scrubbing and washing; they had been taken away from school at the earliest possible moment so that they might look after still younger Ponts, and then had gone early to work-to take their share of the burden which had grown too heavy for their parents' backs.

Rosie had not liked going to school. She had not liked leaving school when she was thirteen and looking after her little brother Leslie, and she had not liked, when Leslie grew old enough to go to school himself, being packed off by her mother to Wait's Farm, to clean the fowl houses, collect eggs, mix chicken food, scrub the dairy floor, and make herself generally useful for five shillings a week.

"You don't know your own luck, Rose," her friend, Emma Brown, had said to her just as she was starting. "Now you might be having to go away into the Shires, just as I am. That's hard. I'd give anything to be stopping here among them all, but there isn't much work in these parts, and you're lucky to get it."

Emma Brown was quite four years older than Rosie. She had been a pupil teacher at Rosie's school in the days when Rosie was still on the safe side of twelve. Then things had gone wrong with Emma. Her father and mother had

died within a few weeks of each other, no money had been left, and she had been obliged to give up her ambitions in the way of education and turn to farm work like other girls in Oxhurst village. She had worked for some time at the Loose Farm, a mile from Wait's, but they had had bad luck at the Loose and had turned away several hands, and now Emma could not get work in the neighborhood, so had been obliged to take a post as dairy girl on a big farm in Shropshire.

Rosie was very sorry that she should have to go, for she was fond of Emma. But she could not feel that her friend was so unlucky as she made out, for it was possible that away in the big world of the Shires Emma might come to glories beyond the reach of chicken girls in Sussex.

They wrote to each other for nearly a year. Emma did not like Shropshire ways, and she found her work hard and perplexing, owing to unaccustomed methods of farming. Botvyl, the farm in Shropshire, could have swallowed up two or three Waits and Looses in its acres-"And all the work there is to do, and the ways they have of doing it, you'd never guess, Rosie."

Rosie wrote in her turn and gave news of Oxhurst and the Ponts, and the Orpingtons and Wyandottes at Wait's, but, naturally, letter writing did not fulfill the same need for her as it did for the exiled Emma, nor had she Emma's pen of a ready pupil-teacher. Letters were a "tar'ble gurt trouble,” as she told her mother, and after a time hers grew farther and farther apart, till there would be two of Emma's between two of hers. Then when summer came, with the long evenings, Tom Boorner,

the plowman's son, asked her to go cut with him into the twilight fields and lanes. They would go down the Bostal Lane, to where the gate looks over the fields toward Udiam and the Rother marshes, full of the cold mists of the twilight east, with the stars hanging dim and still above them, and there they would stand for half an hour, perhaps. They had not much to say to each other, but somehow it used to fill their evenings, and, what was more, it filled Rosie's thoughts, so that at last she seemed to forget all about Emma Brown. Emma grew tired of writing and getting no answer, and after a time the letters ceased.

Two months after she received the last, when the summer was gone and the gold corn stubble had been plowed out of the autumn fields, it was known at Wait's and through Oxhurst that Tom Boorner and Rosie Pont would marry as soon as they were old enough and had the money. This did not plunge the neighborhood into any very great excitement, for it was not expected that the marriage would take place for five or six years at least. The couple were extremely young and their prospects were not very bright. Besides, a courtship which did not run into years was not considered "seemly” in the country round Oxhurst.

"Now don't you go thinking above yourself, Rosie," said her mother. "You'll have to work harder than ever with a marriage ahead of you. Tom's a good boy, but he ain't making more than fifteen shillings a week, and your father and me can't do nothing for you; so you'll have to put by a bit every week for buying your clothes and sheets and things, and then maybe, by the time Tom's ready to marry, you'll have enough money to set up housekeeping."

Rosie took her mother's words to heart. Under her rather stolid exterior was a very lively desire for the little home that Tom had promised, and she was anxious that it should materialize as quickly as possible. Not only did she do

her usual work with more than usual thoroughness, but she occasionally helped Mrs. Bream of Wait's in the house when she was short of girls, and on Saturday afternoons, which were supposed to be holidays, she occasionally put in half a day's charing at the Vicarage or at the week-end cottage the artist people had taken in Bostal Lane. These extra shillings were carefully put away in a wooden money box, bought by her father for that very purpose at Battle fair.

Thus it happened that at the end of five years Rosie had saved nearly fifteen pounds. She was now nineteen and Tom was twenty-two. His fifteen shillings a week had been made a pound and there was no reason why they should not be married in the spring. Tom was very proud of her. He said she had been a good girl to work so hard and save so much, and that it spoke well for her success as housewife in the little cottage which on his marriage would be added to his wages from Tileman's farm.

Rosie was proud of herself and inclined to boast a bit. She would be married in a white dress made by the dressmaker at Battle. She would have a coat and skirt in her favorite blue, a felt hat with a quill in it, and a bit of fur to go round her neck. She had already begun to buy one or two little things-bargains that were brought to her notice by other girls or friends of her mother. She had a silk blouse and a pair of artificial silk stockings and a belt with a silver buckle.

Then one day a peddler came to Wait's Farm with lace collars and hat ribbons and jeweled combs for the hair. He said that he had been told down in the village that one of the young ladies up at Wait's was going to be married, and he promised her that she would find nothing better or cheaper than what he carried on his tray.

"I've been all over England, miss," he said to her in the queer "furrin” voice which she and the other girls sometimes found difficult to understand. "I've been in Scotland, where the lasses