It is not difficult to trace the origin of the nervous and mental disease from which she suffered. Kerner's account of her childhood shows plainly that she was born temperamentally imaginative and unstable and that she was raised in an environment well calculated to exaggerate her imaginativeness and instability. Ghosts and goblins were favorite topics of conversation among the peasantry of Prevorst, while the children with whom she played were many of them unstable like herself, neurotic, hysterical, and the victims of St. Vitus's dance. The weird and uneasy ideas and feelings which thus early took possession of her were given firmer lodgment by her unfortunate sojourn with grave-haunting Grandfather Schmidgall. After this, it seems, she suffered for a year from some eye trouble, and every physician knows how close the connection is between optical disease and hallucinations. Then came a brief period of seeming normality, the lull before the storm which burst in full force with her marriage to a man she did not love. From that time, the helpless victim of hysteria in its most deep-seated and obstinate form, she gave herself unreservedly to the delusions which both arose from and intensified her physical ills--ills which after all had a purely mental basis. "If I doubted the reality of these apparitions," she once told Kerner, "I should be in danger of insanity; for it would make me doubt the reality of everything I saw." It does not affect this view of the case that she unquestionably cooperated with her conscienceless sister and the servant girl in the production of the fraudulent phenomena to which Kerner testifies. Their cheating was probably done for the sole purpose of making sure of the comfortable berth in which the physician's credulity had placed them. Hers, on the other hand, was the deceit of an irresponsible mind, of one living in such an atmosphere of unreality that she could readily persuade herself that the knockings, candle dancings, book openings, and similar acts were the work not of her own hands but of the ghosts which tormented her. Indeed, researches of recent years in the field of abnormal psychology show it is quite possible that she was absolutely ignorant of any personal participation in the movements and sounds which caused such wide-spread mystification. Sympathy and pity, therefore, should take the place of condemnation when we follow the course of her eventful and unhappy life. FOOTNOTES: [M] Kerner's account of Frederica Hauffe is found in his "Die Seherin von Prevorst," accessible in an English translation by Mrs. Catharine Crowe. Students of the supernatural, it may be added, will find a great deal of interesting material in Mrs. Crowe's "The Night Side of Nature." VIII THE MYSTERIOUS MR. HOME "So you've brought the devil to my house, have you?" "No, no, aunty, no! It's not my fault."