minds which, having studied the subject, agree with me in my conclusions were to be as frank as I am, there would be a large body of witnesses in accord with me.  If the inference of a disembodied intelligence, as the source of such phenomena, is difficult of acceptation, that of fraud and collusion is inadmissible, and that of hallucination more difficult than that of the spiritual origin.  Of the different hypotheses, then, I take that which seems the most satisfactory one in view of the ascertained facts.  But “seeing is believing,” and I can fully appreciate the incredulity of reasonable minds as to phenomena which are not in line with our ordinary experience of life, and which, at the same time, are of extreme rarity, and require, for their investigation and actual observation, great patience and the sacrifice of much time and the exercise of much tolerance, surrounded, as the subject is, by gross charlatanry and fraud.  But if the beginnings of physical life are worth the years of patient study which science has accorded them, I must believe that the final issue of it is worth the time and study needed to arrive at such results as would, I am convinced, finally crown them.  If it were worth while, I could, I am persuaded, define, a priori, the lines of investigation along which we should move, but each investigator will choose his own route, and better so.

Two conclusions I draw from my investigations as immovably established, so far as I am concerned.  The first is that there are about us, and with certain facilities for making themselves understood by us, spiritual individualities; and, second, that the human being possesses spiritual senses, parallel with the physical, by which it sees what the physical sense cannot see, and hears what is inaudible to the physical ear.  And my general and, I think, logical conclusion is that the spiritual senses appertain to a spiritual body which survives the death of the physical.

CHAPTER X

LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

Under the stimulus, in part, of the desire for something out of the ordinary line of subject for pictures, and in part from the hope that going into the “desert” might quicken the spiritual faculties so tantalized by the experience of the circles, I decided to pass the next summer in the great primeval forest in the northern part of New York State, known as the Adirondack wilderness.  It was then little known or visited; a few sportsmen and anglers had penetrated it, but for the most part it was known only to the lumberers.  Here and there, at intervals of ten to twenty miles, there were log houses, some of which gave hospitality in the summer to the sportsmen, and in the winter to the “loggers” who worked for the great lumber companies.  It was a tract of a hundred miles, more or less, across, mainly unbroken wildwood, cut up by rapid rivers, impossible of navigation, otherwise than by canoes and light skiffs which could be carried