* * * * *

He did continue the argument.  I stole up to-day and looked over his shoulder.  He was writing the history of our discussion.  It was the same old nonsense about the eternity of forms.  But as I continued to read, he wrote down the practical test I had made with the poker.  Now this is unfair and untrue.  I made no test.  In falling he struck his head on the poker.

* * * * *

Some day, somebody will find and read what he writes.  This will be terrible.  I am suspicious of the servant, who is always peeping and peering, trying to see what I write.  I must do something.  Every servant I have had is curious about what I write.

* * * * *

Fabric of fancy.  That is all it is.  There is no Jim who sits in the chair.  I know that.  Last night, when the house was asleep, I went down into the cellar and looked carefully at the soil around the chimney.  It was untampered with.  The dead do not rise up.

* * * * *

Yesterday morning, when I entered the study, there he was in the chair.  When I had dispelled him, I sat in the chair myself all day.  I had my meals brought to me.  And thus I escaped the sight of him for many hours, for he appears only in the chair.  I was weary, but I sat late, until eleven o’clock.  Yet, when I stood up to go to bed, I looked around, and there he was.  He had slipped into the chair on the instant.  Being only fabric of fancy, all day he had resided in my brain.  The moment it was unoccupied, he took up his residence in the chair.  Are these his boasted higher planes of existence—­his brother’s brain and a chair?  After all, was he not right?  Has his eternal form become so attenuated as to be an hallucination?  Are hallucinations real entities?  Why not?  There is food for thought here.  Some day I shall come to a conclusion upon it.

* * * * *

He was very much disturbed to-day.  He could not write, for I had made the servant carry the pen out of the room in his pocket But neither could I write.

* * * * *

The servant never sees him.  This is strange.  Have I developed a keener sight for the unseen?  Or rather does it not prove the phantom to be what it is—­a product of my own morbid consciousness?

* * * * *

He has stolen my pen again.  Hallucinations cannot steal pens.  This is unanswerable.  And yet I cannot keep the pen always out of the room.  I want to write myself.

* * * * *

I have had three different servants since my trouble came upon me, and not one has seen him.  Is the verdict of their senses right?  And is that of mine wrong?  Nevertheless, the ink goes too rapidly.  I fill my pen more often than is necessary.  And furthermore, only to-day I found my pen out of order.  I did not break it.