in the cellar, and was just going to get something to eat.  I was certainly not under the influence of strong drink, for I was then, as I have been for forty-nine years, a teetotaler.  My mind at the time was perfectly free from trouble.  What increased the excitement was the fact that a man a number of years before, who was employed in the office of the station, had committed suicide, and his body had been carried into this very cellar.  I knew nothing of this circumstance, nor of the body of the man, but Mr. Pease and others who had known him, told me my description exactly corresponded to his appearance and the way he dressed, and also that he had a black retriever just like the one which gripped me.  I should add that no mark or effect remained on the spot where I seemed to be seized.

“(Signed) JAMES DURHAM. “Dec. 9th, 1890.”

Following the above statement Mr. Stead appends Mr. Kendall’s reasons for believing that what James Durham experienced was objective psychic phenomena, and neither produced during sleep nor by hallucination.

The arguments used strike me as being so concise and sensible that I think it will not be out of place to reproduce them.

“First,” Mr. Kendall says, “he (James Durham) was accustomed as watchman to be up all night, and therefore not likely from that cause to feel sleepy.  Secondly, he had scarcely been a minute in the cellar, and, feeling hungry, was just going to get something to eat.  Thirdly, if he was asleep at the beginning of the vision, he must have been awake enough during the latter part of it when he had knocked the skin off his knuckles.  Fourthly, there was his own confident testimony.  I strongly incline to the opinion that there was an objective cause for the vision, and that it was genuinely apparitional.”

So interested was Mr. Kendall in the case that he visited the spot some short time later.  He was taken into the cellar where the manifestations took place, and his guide, an old official of the North Road Station, informed him he well remembered the clerk—­a man of the name of Winter—­who committed suicide there, and showed him the exact spot where he had shot himself with a pistol.  In dress and appearance Mr. Winter corresponded minutely with the phenomenon described by James Durham, and he had had a black retriever.

Mr. Kendal came away more convinced than ever of the veracity of James Durham’s story, though he admits it was not evidential after the high standard of the S.P.R.  I do not know whether the S.P.R. published the case, and I certainly do not think Mr. Kendall need have minded if they did not—­for after all there is no reason to suppose the judgment of the S.P.R. is always infallible.

Mr. Stead does not comment on the apparition of the dog, which leads one to suppose cases of animal phantasms were by no means uncommon to him.

The Grey Dog of ——­ House, Birmingham