and their servants had left Scotland.  This so completely exonerates them from the absurd charge, that I should hardly have mentioned it, had not Miss Freer seemed quite under the impression that practical jokes had been played during the tenancy of the H——­s; and as a proof of this, she told me that the doors, especially of two of the rooms, were marked with nailed boots, and the panels even split through, and this damage was attributed by her to the younger members of the H——­ family.  I am happy to say I was able to disabuse her mind of this idea, as we were staying at B——­ within a few days of their leaving Scotland, and I had most carefully examined the doors especially of the two rooms specified, one of which was our own room.  There was not a scratch, nor the smallest mark or indentation; others can also vouch for this fact.  The H——­s had all left B——­ for good at that time, except the eldest son, and Miss Freer agreed with me that whatever damage was done to the doors, must therefore have been done after the H——­s left, and before her party came in....  The hot-water pipe theory revived by the writer of the article in The Times is disproved by Miss Freer, who told me that the hot-water apparatus was not used for some time, and that the disturbances continued just the same....  The stories told in connection with B——­ were not circulated or started by the H——­ family.  They were told to them by persons living around B——.”

In a letter to Miss Freer, dated June 12th, Mrs.  “G.” writes, in reference to the charge of practical joking:—­

“They are the most unlikely family to do such a thing; and besides, if further proof were wanted, the young men of the family were away from B——­ when we stayed there ten days, and there was only one night when we did not hear the noises.”

Miss Freer of course entirely accepts Mrs.  “G.’s” statement, and that of Mr. H——­ as published in The Times.  She had been led to her earlier conclusions as to the marks of a boot-heel on the upper panels of the doors by the statements of interested persons.

A suggestive point in this connection is the fact, to which Miss “G.” has herself testified, that while Mr. and Mrs.  “G.” were disturbed to the utmost degree, their daughter, who slept in a room communicating with that of her mother, heard nothing whatever; from which it would appear that the noises heard by them were subjective, and that the alleged evidence of the boot-heel, even were it credible, would be, in fact, irrelevant.

The mention of the hallucinatory nature of such phenomena suggests attention to the intellectual acumen displayed by The Times correspondent in saying that “Lord Bute ought to have employed a couple of intelligent detectives” for the purpose of catching subjective hallucinations.  On the same principle, he ought to offer to his learned friend, Sir James Crichton-Browne, well known as an alienist, some advice as to the best mode of securing morbid hallucinations in strait-waistcoats.  Is he prepared to propose to take photographs of a dream, to put thoughts under lock and key, or to advocate the supply of hot and cold water on every floor of a castle in the air?