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SOME STRANGE DOINGS 49 side of them. They are not allowed to hurt humans, but we all do things we’re not allowed to do, and they are very human themselves. You remember how The Times correspondent got his head cut open with the tambourine in one of the Davenport Brothers’ seances. Very wrong, of course, but it happened. No friend ever got his head cut open. There was another case down Stepney way. A money-lender went to a seance. Some victim that he had driven to suicide got into the medium. He got the money-lender by the throat and it was a close thing for his life. But I’m off, Mr. Malone. We sit once a week and have done for four years without a break. Eight o’clock Thursdays. Give us a day’s notice and I’ll get Mr. Mailey to meet you. He can answer questions better than I. Next Thursday ! Very good.” And Mr. Bolsover lurched out of the room.

Both Malone and Enid Challenger had, perhaps, been more shaken by their short experience than they had admitted, but both were sensible people who agreed that every possible natural cause should be ex¬ hausted — and very thoroughly exhausted — before the bounds of what is possible should be enlarged. Both of them had the utmost respect for the ponderous intellect of Challenger and were affected by his strong views, though Malone was compelled to admit in the frequent arguments in which he was plunged that the opinion of a clever man who has had no experience is really of less value than that of the man in the street who has actually been there.

These arguments, as often as not, were with Mervin, editor of the psychic paper Dawn, which dealt with every phase of the occult, from the lore of the Rosicrucians to the strange regions of the students of the Great Pyramid, or of those who uphold the Jewish