Fig. 70.  The first image that spontaneously presented itself was a cross-bow (1); this was immediately provided with an arrow (2), remarkable for its pronounced barb and superabundance of feathering.  Some person, but too indistinct to recognise much more of him than the hands, appeared to shoot the arrow from the bow.  The single arrow was then accompanied by a flight of arrows from right to left, which completely occupied the field of vision.  These changed into falling stars, then into flakes of a heavy snowstorm; the ground gradually appeared as a sheet of snow where previously there had been vacant space.  Then a well-known rectory, fish-ponds, walls, etc., all covered with snow, came into view most vividly and clearly defined.  This somehow suggested another view, impressed on his mind in childhood, of a spring morning, brilliant sun, and a bed of red tulips:  the tulips gradually vanished except one, which appeared now to be isolated and to stand in the usual point of sight.  It was a single tulip, but became double.  The petals then fell off rapidly in a continuous series until there was nothing left but the pistil (3), but (as is almost invariably the case with his objects) that part was greatly exaggerated.  The stigmas then changed into three branching brown horns (4); then into a knob (5), while the stalk changed into a stick.  A slight bend in it seems to have suggested a centre-bit (6); this passed into a sort of pin passing through a metal plate (7), this again into a lock (8), and afterwards into a nondescript shape (9), distantly suggestive of the original cross-bow.  Here Mr. Henslow endeavoured to force his will upon the visions, and to reproduce the cross-bow, but the first attempt was an utter failure.  The figure changed into a leather strap with loops (10), but while he still endeavoured to change it into a bow the strap broke, the two ends were separated, but it happened that an imaginary string connected them (11).  This was the first concession of his automatic chain of thoughts to his will.  By a continued effort the bow came (12), and then no difficulty was felt in converting it into the cross-bow, and thus returning to the starting-point.  Fig. 71.  Mr. Henslow writes:—­

“Though I can usually summon up any object thought of, it not only is somewhat different from the real thing, but it rapidly changes.  The changes are in many cases clearly due to a suggestiveness in the article of something else, but not always so, as in some cases hereafter described.  It is not at ail necessary to think of any particular object at first, as something is sure to come spontaneously within a minute or two.  Some object having once appeared, the automatism of the brain will rapidly induce the series of changes.  The images are sometimes very numerous, and very rapid in succession:  very frequently of great beauty and highly brilliant.  Cut glass (far more elaborate than I am conscious of ever having seen), highly chased gold and silver filigree ornaments; gold and silver flower-stands, etc.; elaborate coloured patterns of carpets in brilliant tints are not uncommon.