“There is one white ball missing.”

Clemens, to satisfy himself, also made the round of the pockets, and said: 

“It was here last night.”  He felt in the pockets of the little white-silk coat which he usually wore, thinking that he might unconsciously have placed it there at the end of the last game, but his coat pockets were empty.

He said:  “I’ll bet Littleton carried that ball home with him.”

Then I suggested that near the end of the game it might have jumped off the table, and I looked carefully under the furniture and in the various corners, but without success.  There was another set of balls, and out of it I selected a white one for our play, and the game began.  It went along in the usual way, the balls constantly falling into the pockets, and as constantly being replaced on the table.  This had continued for perhaps half an hour, there being no pocket that had not been frequently occupied and emptied during that time; but then it happened that Clemens reached into the middle pocket, and taking out a white ball laid it in place, whereupon we made the discovery that three white balls lay upon the table.  The one just taken from the pocket was the missing ball.  We looked at each other, both at first too astonished to say anything at all.  No one had been in the room since we began to play, and at no time during the play had there been more than two white balls in evidence, though the pockets had been emptied at the end of each shot.  The pocket from which the missing ball had been taken had been filled and emptied again and again.  Then Clemens said: 

“We must be dreaming.”

We stopped the game for a while to discuss it, but we could devise no material explanation.  I suggested the kobold—­that mischievous invisible which is supposed to play pranks by carrying off such things as pencils, letters, and the like, and suddenly restoring them almost before one’s eyes.  Clemens, who, in spite of his material logic, was always a mystic at heart, said: 

“But that, so far as I know, has never happened to more than one person at a time, and has been explained by a sort of temporary mental blindness.  This thing has happened to two of us, and there can be no question as to the positive absence of the object.”

“How about dematerialization?”

“Yes, if one of us were a medium that might be considered an explanation.”

He went on to recall that Sir Alfred Russel Wallace had written of such things, and cited instances which Wallace had recorded.  In the end he said: 

“Well, it happened, that’s all we can say, and nobody can ever convince me that it didn’t.”

We went on playing, and the ball remained solid and substantial ever after, so far as I know.