that this cup had been on the floor three times, and that she had picked it up just before it went off the bench.  I said, “I suppose the cup will be the next.”  The cup fell a distance of two yards away from the flour-bin.  Dr. Lloyd had been in the next house lancing the back of a little boy who had been removed there.  He now came in, and we began talking, the doctor saying, “It is a most mysterious thing.”  He turned with his back to the flour-bin, on which stood a basin.  The basin flew up into the air obliquely, went over the doctor’s head, and fell at his feet in pieces.  The doctor then went out.  I stood a short time longer, but saw nothing farther.  There were six persons in the room while these things were going on, and so far as I could see, there was no human agency at work.  I had not the slightest belief in anything appertaining to the super-natural.  I left just before one o’clock, having been in the house thirty minutes.’

As the policeman says, there was nothing ‘super-natural,’ but there was an appearance of something rather supernormal.  On the afternoon of Saturday White sent the girl Rose away, and a number of people watched in his house till after midnight.  Though the sceptical reporter thought that objects were placed where they might easily be upset, none were upset.  The ghost was laid.  ‘Excited expectation’ was so false to its function as to beget no phenomena.

The newspaper reports contain no theory that will account for White’s breaking his furniture and crockery, nor for Rose’s securing her own dismissal from a house where she was kindly received by wilfully destroying the property of her hostess.  An amateur published a theory of silken threads attached to light articles, and thick cords to heavy articles, whereof no trace was found by witnesses who examined the volatile objects.  An elaborate machinery of pulleys fixed in the ceiling, the presence of a trickster in a locked pantry, apparent errors in the account of the flight of the objects, and a number of accomplices, were all involved in this local explanation, the explainer admitting that he could not imagine why the tricks were played.  Six or eight pounds’ worth of goods were destroyed, nor is it singular that poor Mrs. White wept over her shattered penates.

The destruction began, of course, in the absence of White.  The girl Rose gave to the newspaper the same account as the other witnesses, but, as White thought she was the agent, so she suspected White, though she admitted that he was not at home when the trouble arose.

Mr. Podmore, reviewing the case, says, ’The phenomena described are quite inexplicable by ordinary mechanical means.[3] Yet he elsewhere[4] suggests that Rose herself, ’as the instrument of mysterious agencies, or simply as a half-witted girl, gifted with abnormal cunning and love of mischief, may have been directly responsible for all that took place.’  That is to say, a half-witted girl could do (barring