guardedly to the doctor, “I asked Alfred when he last saw Harvey, and he replies that he doesn’t remember, but he must have seen him on board the boat.”  To this she instantly replied, with an explosive laugh, “He says that if he did it was all blown out of him!” I will only comment on this reply, that it was quite in accordance with the character of my brother to joke on the most serious subjects—­he was an inveterate joker.

At this juncture, and while we discussed the strange reply, Fanny exclaimed, “There is a young gentleman coming through the window; he says his name is Harry—­no,” she added, holding her ear forward in the direction she indicated as if to hear better, “not Harry, Harvey.”  I then asked, “If Harvey is here, will he tell me if he was with me in Paris, last winter?” She replied, “Yes, he says he was with you in Paris, and that he saw you in the house where you lived with Mrs. Fox—­no, not Fox, Coxe—­Mrs. Coxe—­and he asks if you remember magnetizing Mrs. Coxe at the restaurant?” Mrs. Coxe, as I have said previously, was the lady from Alabama whose acquaintance, as well as that of her husband and their young daughter, I had made when traveling with them through Belgium, on my way to Hungary, and whom Mr. Coxe, when he returned on business to America, left under my protection for the winter.  Mrs. Coxe was subject to violent and sudden headaches, which came without warning, and for which during our trip on the Meuse I had once hypnotized her successfully.  This led to my being called on subsequently so often that she became an easy subject, and the headaches became less and less frequent and violent.  I have before said that it was our custom on Sunday to dine together at some one of the restaurants, and on one of these occasions the headache came on as we sat at the table and I hypnotized her across the table, by simple exertion of my will without passes, and it passed off.  The incident was not in my mind, and had, not to cause gossip, never been mentioned by me to any one; my mind was acting at the moment in quite a different direction, and if my thought gave any clue to the answers of Fanny, it would have been in another direction that she would have looked.  What was singular and accounted for by no evident circumstance was the manner of the child in listening for the names which she had clearly heard incorrectly—­Harry for Harvey, and Fox for Coxe, and after holding her ear forward as would one who heard imperfectly something said to him.  No forethought or attempt at deception on the part of a child of seven under the eye of her mother, who was a woman of singular sincerity of character, can be admitted to account for these details in the dialogue, conducted on my part, be it remembered, entirely by mental inquiries.