He came on a Saturday noon.  That afternoon we attended en masse one of those refined inquisitions commonly known as picnics, and Winthrop lost his pocket-knife.  Selphar, of course, kept house at home.

When we returned, Winthrop made some careless reference to his loss in her presence, and thought no more of it.  About half an hour after, we observed that she was washing the dishes with her eyes shut.  The condition had not been upon her five minutes before she dropped the spoon suddenly into the water, and asked permission to go out to walk.  She “saw Mr. Winthrop’s knife somewhere under a stone, and wanted to get it.”  It was fully two miles to the picnic grounds, and nearly dark.  Winthrop followed the girl, unknown to her, and kept her in sight.  She went rapidly, and without the slightest hesitation or search, to an out-of-the-way gully down by the pond, where Winthrop afterwards remembered having gone to cut some willow-twigs for the girls, parted a thick cluster of bushes, lifted a large, loose stone under which the knife had rolled, and picked it up.  She returned it to Winthrop, quietly, and hurried away about her work to avoid being thanked.

I observed that, after this incident, masculine Creston became more respectful.

Of several peculiarities in this development of the girl I made at the time careful memoranda, and the exactness of these can be relied upon.

1.  She herself, so far from attempting to bring on these trance states, or taking any pride therein, was intensely troubled and mortified by them,—­would run out of the room, if she felt them coming on in the presence of visitors.

2.  They were apt to be preceded by severe headaches, but came often without any warning.

3.  She never, in any instance, recalled anything that happened during the trance, after it was passed.

4.  She was powerfully and unpleasantly affected by electricity from a battery, or acting in milder forms.  She was also unable at any time to put her hands and arms into hot water; the effect was to paralyze them at once.

5.  Space proved to be no impediment to her vision.  She has been known to follow the acts, words, and expressions of countenance of members of the family hundreds of miles away, with accuracy as was afterwards proved by comparing notes as to time.

6.  The girl’s eyes, after her trances became habitual, assumed, and always retained, the most singular expression I ever saw on any face.  They were oblong and narrow, and set back in her head like the eyes of a snake.  They were not—­smile if you will, O practical and incredulous reader! but they were not—­eyes.  The eyes of Elsie Venner are the only eyes I can think of as at all like them.  The most horrible circumstance about them—­a circumstance that always made me shudder, familiar as I was with it—­was, that, though turned fully on you, they never looked at you.  Something behind them or out of them did the seeing, not they.