urn, and the final burial.  What agonies of simple grief the place must have witnessed!  Then, I suppose, the place was deserted by the Romans, the walls crumbled down into ruin, grass and bushes grew over the place.  Then perhaps the forest was gradually felled and stubbed up, as the area of cultivation widened; but still the sad tradition of the spot left it desolate, until all recollection of its purpose was gone.  No doubt, in Saxon days, it was thought to be haunted by the old wailing, restless spirits of those who had suffered the last rites there; so that still the place was condemned to a sinister solitude.

I went on to reflect over the strange and obstinate tradition that lingers still with such vitality among the human race, that certain places are haunted by the spirits of the dead.  It is hard to believe that such tradition, so widespread, so universal, should have no kind of justification in fact.  And yet there appears to be no justification for the idea, unless the spiritual conditions of the world have altered, unless there were real phenomena, which have for some cause ceased to manifest themselves, which originated the tradition.  But there is certainly no scientific evidence of the fact.  The Psychical Society, which has faced some ridicule for its serious attempt to find out the truth about these matters, have announced that investigations of so-called haunted houses have produced no evidence whatever.  They seem to be a wholly unreliable type of stories, which always break down under careful inquiry.  I am inclined myself to believe that such stories arose in a perfectly natural way.  It is perfectly natural to simple people to believe that the spirit which animated a mortal body would, on leaving it, tend to linger about the scene of suffering and death.  Indeed, it is impossible not to feel that, if the spirit has any conscious identity, it would be sure to desire to remain in the neighbourhood of those whom it loved so well.  But the unsatisfactory element in these stories is that it generally appears to be the victim of some heinous deed, and not the perpetrator, who is condemned to make its sad presence known, by wailing and by sorrowful gestures, on the scene of its passion.  But once given the belief that a spirit might tend to remain for a time in the place where its earthly life was lived, the terrors of man, his swift imagination, his power of self-delusion, would do the rest.

The only class of stories, say the investigators, which appear to be proved beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt, is the class of stories dealing with apparitions at the time of death; and this they explain by supposing a species of telepathy, which is indeed an obscure force, but obviously an existing one, though its conditions and limitations are not clearly understood.  Telepathy is the power of communication between mind and mind without the medium of speech, and indeed in certain cases exercised at an immense distance.  The theory is that the thought