I may end this chapter with a story which points a moral. I shall first give the story. I shall then give the key which explains what seemed to many to be incredible. I shall then, after the fashion of my calling, point out the moral. The story, then, is this: One afternoon at the witching hour, when the drowsy air invites to seductive repose, an old lady was seated in her armchair, and the welcome influence of the rest-giving hour was upon her; the door of the living-room was open, and the pleasant sunshine of the sleepy afternoon threw a lane of light down the two or three steps by which the house was entered, and spread a square patch of light across the kitchen floor. The house was on the lower side of the road which climbs from the city of Lancaster to the famous castle known as Lancaster Gaol. Suddenly the woman awoke from her half-slumbrous condition and beheld a startling apparition. Down the steps there came, bumping upon each step as it fell, a human head, and rolled into the middle of the kitchen. A further apparition appeared, the black and ghastly head was followed by a headless figure, draped in a long cloak; it reached out from beneath the cloak an eager, clutching hand, while a voice as from a sepulchre cried, "Where's my head? Give me my head!" The head was seized, the figure vanished, and the woman fainted.

The neighbours found her and restored her to consciousness, and to them she told the tale. She declared that her husband's head came bumping and rolling into the kitchen (she had been married to a black man), and that the Devil had come and had carried it off. The neighbours

shook their heads and looked at one another with significant and incredulous gestures. The meaning of all was quite clear the old lady had had a fit, and had dreamed or fancied this horror. They disbelieved the tale they regarded the old lady as the victim of some hallucination. Common sense refused to believe such a gruesome and incredible tale; but common sense was wrong, and the old lady was right in her facts, though wrong in her inference. Here is the key of the matter: After the Rugeley murder, scientific men showed some active interest in the formation of human skulls. Dr. William Palmer, the man who poisoned Mr. James Parsons Cook with strychnine, had a remarkable head, and a certain eminent man of science. began to study the heads of criminals. The governor of Lancaster Gaol, with whom he was acquainted, knew that this man of science was studying heads, and wrote to tell him of a prisoner then in Lancaster Gaol-a negro-whose head was specially striking and peculiar. The prisoner, he said, was dangerously, and more than dangerously, ill, and was not likely to survive more than a day or two. If the man of science would like it, the governor added, he could perhaps allow him, after the man's death, to take away the head for examination. As such a thing, however, was against prison rules, the man of science must come to the gaol prepared to carry away the head with him. Accordingly the learned professor provided himself with a long cloak, appeared at the gaol, and at the proper moment received the ghastly burden. To save time and to avoid observation, he chose a short cut from the gaol to the town. Instead of following the winding of the slow,

descending road, he took a path which cut across the curves of the road and shortened the distance. Such a short cut meant, of course, a more declivitous descent, and as fortune or fate would have it, when he emerged from the path to cross the road, he stumbled: the head slipped from his rolled away grasp, and reached an open door, and promptly fell down the steps at the entrance and disappeared into the cottage. There was only one thing to be done : the head must be rescued, and rescued with as much secrecy as possible. It would never do to run the risk of publicity and get the governor into trouble! Therefore the professor acted with discreet rapidity: he drew his cloak over his head to conceal his face; he dashed into the cottage to recover his precious burden, and in order to awe any one who might be there, he said in a sepulchral voice: "Where's my head? Give me my head!" as he seized his treasure and departed with it. The story was explained; facts were no longer incredible; the old woman was substantially correct: the head had rolled down her steps into her cottage, and had been rescued by an apparently headless figure.

And now for the moral. There is a shallow habit of rejecting stories as untrue because they contain some features which seem to be strangely improbable we dub them as impossible: we dismiss them as dreams or crazy imaginings. In doing so we cut ourselves off from the pathway of truth; a little more tolerance, a little more attention, followed by patient inquiry, may lead to some interesting discovery of fact or law. There is nothing so credulous as the scepticism which makes it a habit to reject

as valueless or false anything and everything which seems outside or contradictory of a few accepted and idolized laws. Such folk put on blinkers: they can only see what lies on the centre of the beaten track: their eyes never travel into the hedges and byways of life: their outlook is limited, and out of this glorified habit of narrowness there grows the old-fogeyism which cannot understand, still less accept, new ideas or fresh messages from new fields of inquiry.

This obstinate attitude of mind was exemplified in my early experiences. A cousin of ours came to pay us a visit. She brought with her a boy about my own age. Like children, we were telling what we had seen, and in the course of doing so we told this boy that we had seen a train which travelled without a steam-engine. We were met with the vigorous rebuke: "Don't tell Balcram's lies." I don't know now and I didn't know then what Balcram meant, but we resented the sceptical attitude of this lad who made his own measure the limit of his intelligence. We had seen what he had not-the atmospheric railway which then plied between Kingstown and Dalkey in Ireland. The train travelled by atmospheric pressure, the air being liberated from a tube laid between the rails. The ignorant rudeness of the boy was a serviceable experience. It taught the same moral which I have tried to enforce as the lesson of the wandering head which terrified the old lady at Lancaster.

COUSINS AND BROTHER

PAGILDEAFILDA!

We were all seated at lunch; my father at the head, my mother at the foot of the table. The engravings of the Royal Irish Art Union hung round the room; Turner's "Ancient and Modern Italy" flanked Martin's picture of "The Opening of the Sixth Seal"; over the chimneypiece was my father's portrait; over the sideboard, which faced the tall window, was the "Irish Blind Girl at the Holy Well." The room had been still and quiet till, in answer to a question from my father, came the strange burst of unintelligible syllables—

"Pagildeafilda."

My father had said, "We expected to see you yesterday," and this was the reply. We all gazed at the speaker, blank wonder and perplexed questioning in our countenances. My father uttered a faint inquiry, "What?" only to meet with a rapid reiteration of the enigmatic formula

"Pagildeafilda."

We were puzzled; this was a new language; yet the speaker's absolute sincerity, and his complete conviction that he had uttered what was reasonable and sufficient, were obvious.