night, and allowed him no rest till he got up. If he obstinately remained lying in bed he began to have palpitations.

"Well?" he concluded, awaiting my answer with manifest impatience.

"It was just the same with me," I replied.

"And how did you get cured?"

Was it cowardice, or did I obey an inner voice when I answered, "I took sulphonal."

His face assumed an expression of disappointment, but I could do nothing for him.

IV

MIRACLES

After three months of very severe winter weather, the first signs of spring begin to be visible. One's frozen senses begin to thaw, and the seeds sown under the snow begin to germinate. So much has happened, and instead of rejecting undeniable facts as fortuitous coincidences, I observe and collect them, and draw my inferences. At first I laugh at my own superstition, but later on I cease to smile, and do not know what to believe. Miracles happen, and that every day, but they do not happen to order.

One day before noon I cross the market place, which is empty for the moment. As I have long suffered from "agoraphobia," I dread empty spaces, and cross it with scarcely concealed anxiety. Just now, when I am tired by work, and extremely nervous, the aspect of the deserted market place makes a very painful impression on me, so that I experience a desire to make myself invisible in order to escape curious eyes. I lower my head, fasten my eyes on the pavement, and feel as though I had compressed myself within myself, closed my senses, cut off communication with the outer world, and ceased to feel the influence of my surroundings. Almost unconsciously I have crossed over the market place. The next moment in the street two well-known voices call after me. I remain standing.

"Which way did you come?"

"Over the market place."

"No! How could you? We stood waiting here to meet you and to have dinner together."

"I assure you——"

"Oh; then you made yourself invisible?"

"Nothing is impossible."

"For you, at any rate. They tell the most incredible stories about you."

"I suspected something of the kind, as I have been seen near the Danube, when I was in Paris."

This was really the case, but at this time I believed there were visions without any substratum of reality, and I let drop the remark, merely as a happy idea.

The same day I take my evening meal alone, in the smaller dining-room of the inn. A man, whom I do not know, comes in, apparently to look for some one. He does not seem to notice me although he looks at all the tables, and, believing himself alone in the room, he begins to swear and talk aloud with himself. In order to apprise him of the presence of some one I knock with my fork against a glass. The stranger starts and seems surprised to see some one; he becomes suddenly silent, and hastens away.

From that time I begin to ponder the subject of dematerialisation which the occultists believe in. And proofs follow rapidly. A week later, my attention was aroused by another strange occurrence. It was a Wednesday, when the dining-room of the inn is generally full because of the weekly market. In order to avoid the crowd and the discomfort, my usual table companion has ordered a special room, and, as he has come earlier than myself, he waits for me in the hall, and bids me go upstairs. But in order to save time, we agree to engage the tea-table in the dining-room. Unwillingly I march in behind my friend, because I abominate the drunken farmers and their bad language. Meanwhile we come through the crowd to the tea-table, where there was only one very quiet individual. After we had taken something without exchanging a single word, we retired to our private room, I following him. When we reached the door, my friend seemed astonished to see me.

"Hullo! Where did you come from?"

"From the tea-table, of course."

"I never saw you; I thought you had remained up here."

"Never saw me! Why, our hands crossed over the dishes. Can I then make myself invisible?"

"Well, it is funny anyhow."

When I delve in my memory, I bring now forgotten incidents to light, which were hitherto valueless to a sceptic whose mind had been sterilised by the study of the exact sciences. Thus I remember the morning of my first wedding day. It was a winter Sunday, peculiarly quiet and unnaturally solemn for me who was preparing to quit an impure bachelor life and to settle down by the domestic hearth with the woman I loved. I felt I should like to take my breakfast, the last in my bachelor life, quite alone, and with this object I went down to an underground café in a low street. It was a basement-room lit with gas. After ordering breakfast, I noticed that I was being watched by a number of men who were sitting, obviously in a state of intoxication, round their bottles, since the previous evening. They looked spectrally pale, uncouth, shabby; they were hoarse-voiced and disgusting, after a night spent in debauchery. Among the company I recognised two friends of my youth, who had so come down in the world that they had neither house nor home nor occupation, notorious good-for-nothings, not far from committing some crime. It was not pride which made me shrink from renewing the acquaintanceship; it was the fear of a relapse in the mire, the dislike of finding myself placed back in my past,—for I had gone through a similar stage. At last, when the comparatively soberest of them, chosen as an envoy, stood up in order to approach my table, I was seized with terror. Firmly resolved to deny my identity if necessary, I fix my eyes on my assailant, and without my knowing how it happened he remained standing for a moment before my table, and then with a silly expression, which I can never forget, he makes an apology and returns to his place. He had been prepared to swear that it was I, and yet he did not recognise me.

Then they began to discuss my alibi.

"It is he certainly."

"Yes, the Devil take me, it is!" I quit the place filled with shame at myself and pity for the poor fellows, but in the depth of my heart glad at having escaped such a hateful existence.

Escaped!

Apart from the moral aspect of the question the strange fact remains, that one can so alter one's physiognomy as to be irrecognisable by an old acquaintance whom one meets and I salutes all through the year in the street.

In earlier times I used to go hunting alone, without a dog and often without a rifle. I wandered about at haphazard (it was in Denmark), and once as I was standing in a glade a fox jumped up suddenly beside me. He looked me in the face, in full sunlight, at a distance of about twenty steps. I stood motionless, and the fox continued to search the ground hunting for mice. I stooped to pick up a stone. Then it was his turn to make himself invisible, for he vanished in an instant without my seeing how he did so. When I searched the ground, I found there no trace of a fox-hole, and not even a bush behind which he might have hidden. He had vanished without the help of his legs.

Here and there in the marshy meadows on the banks of the Danube herons often build their nests, and they are extremely shy birds.

In spite of that, I could often surprise them without hiding myself. As long as I kept motionless, I could stand and watch them. Sometimes they even flew close over my head. No one would believe me when I related this, least of all sportsmen, and I concluded therefore that the matter was something above the ordinary.

When I told this to my friend the theosophist in Lund, he remembered an occurrence to which he could never find the key. A workman whom he knew visited him, saying that he had found an antique work of art for sale, and asked him for an advance of five crowns. After the man had received the commission to buy it he had disappeared, and could be found nowhere for three whole months. One Sunday evening the theosophist and his wife