be best to do, it occurred to me that I would write to Mivart, asking him to run down to me at Hurstcote Manor and consult with me, because he had told me that he had given attention to cases of hysteria.  I did this, and persuaded Sinfi to remain and to keep out of Miss Wynne’s sight.  Although Sinfi was still as splendid a woman as ever, I noticed a change in her.  Her animal spirits had fled, and she had to me the appearance of a woman in trouble; but what her trouble was I could not guess, and I cannot now guess.  Perhaps she had been jilted by some Gypsy swain.

When Dr. Mivart came he was much startled at recognising in Miss Wynne his former patient of Raxton, whom he had attended on her first seizure.  He said that it would now be of no use for me to write to you, as it was matter of common knowledge that you had gone to Japan.  If it had not been for this I should have written to you at once.  He took a very grave view of Miss Wynne’s case, and said that her nervous system must shortly succumb to the terrible seizures.  Sinfi Lovell was in the room at the time.  I asked Dr. Mivart if there was any possible means of saving her life.

‘None,’ he said, ‘or rather there is one which is unavailable.’

‘And what is that?’ I asked.

’They have a way at the Salpetriere Hospital of curing cases of acute hysteria By transmitting the seizure to a healthy patient by means of a powerful magnet.  My friend Marini, of that hospital, has had recently some extraordinary successes of this kind.  Indeed, by a strange coincidence, as I was travelling here this morning I chanced to buy a Daily Telegraph, in which this paragraph struck my eye.’

Mivart then pointed out to me a letter from Paris in the Daily Telegraph, giving an account of certain proceedings at the Salpetriere Hospital, and in the same paper there was a long leading article upon the subject.  The report of the experiments was to me so amazing that at first I could not bring my mind to believe in it.  As you will, I am sure, feel some incredulity, I have cut out the paragraph, and here it is pasted at the bottom of this page:—­

’The chief French surgeons and medical professors have, for some time, been carefully studying the effect of mesmerism on the female patients of the Salpetriere Hospital, and M. Marini, a clinical surgeon of that establishment, has just effected a series of experiments, the results of which would seem to open up a new field for medical science.  M. Marini tried to prove that certain hysterical symptoms could be transferred by the aid of the magnet from one patient to another.  He took two subjects:  one a dumb woman afflicted with hysteria, and the other a female who was in a state of hypnotic trance.  A screen was placed between the two, and the hysterical woman was then put under the influence of a strong magnet.  After a few moments she was rendered dumb, while speech was suddenly restored to the other.  Luckily for his healthier patients, however, their borrowed pains and symptoms did not last long.’