realities they would esteem it a sacrilege to distort history.  They make straight for the substantial, the indubitable.  For this reason the Peniculi and Ergasili of Plautus seem to me far more true to nature than the character of Paul Pry in Jerrold’s comedy.  In one instance, indeed, the evidence of Hester Dyett appears, on the surface of it, to be quite false.  She declares that she sees a round white object moving upward in the room.  But the night being gloomy, her taper having gone out, she must have been standing in a dense darkness.  How then could she see this object?  Her evidence, it was argued, must be designedly false, or else (as she was in an ecstatic condition) the result of an excited fancy.  But I have stated that such persons, nervous, neurotic even as they may be, are not fanciful.  I therefore accept her evidence as true.  And now, mark the consequence of that acceptance.  I am driven to admit that there must, from some source, have been light in the room—­a light faint enough, and diffused enough, to escape the notice of Hester herself.  This being so, it must have proceeded from around, from below, or from above.  There are no other alternatives.  Around these was nothing but the darkness of the night; the room beneath, we know, was also in darkness.  The light then came from the room above—­from the mechanic class-room.  But there is only one possible means by which the light from an upper can diffuse a lower room.  It must be by a hole in the intermediate boards.  We are thus driven to the discovery of an aperture of some sort in the flooring of that upper chamber.  Given this, the mystery of the round white object “driven” upward disappears.  We at once ask, why not drawn upward through the newly-discovered aperture by a string too small to be visible in the gloom?  Assuredly it was drawn upward.  And now having established a hole in the ceiling of the room in which Hester stands, is it unreasonable—­even without further evidence—­to suspect another in the flooring?  But we actually have this further evidence.  As she rushes to the door she falls, faints, and fractures the lower part of her leg.  Had she fallen over some object, as you supposed, the result might have been a fracture also, but in a different part of the body; being where it was, it could only have been caused by placing the foot inadvertently in a hole while the rest of the body was in rapid motion.  But this gives us an approximate idea of the size of the lower hole; it was at least big enough to admit the foot and lower leg, big enough therefore to admit that “good-sized ball of cotton” of which the woman speaks:  and from the lower we are able to conjecture the size of the upper.  But how comes it that these holes are nowhere mentioned in the evidence?  It can only be because no one ever saw them.  Yet the rooms must have been examined by the police, who, if they existed, must have seen them.  They therefore did not exist:  that is to say, the pieces which