One other thing she did which very greatly puzzled Queen Margaret, and
all the ladies of the Court, and all the waiting-women, and all the
serving-maids, and, in fine, every person high or low who saw or heard
of it, except the King only. For in winter evenings she took her
scissors and her needle, and she cut strips of ribbon, each a foot long
and a couple of inches broad; on each of them she embroidered a motto
or legend; and she affixed the ribbons bearing the legend to each and
every one of the mirrors in each of her chambers at Strelsau, at Zenda,
and at the other royal residences. And her waiting-women noticed that,
whenever she had looked in the mirror and smiled at her own image or
shewn other signs of pleasure in it, she would then cast her eyes up to
the legend, and seem to read it, and blush a little, and laugh a
little, and sigh a little; the reason for which things they could by no
means understand.
For the legend was but this:
"Remember the Miller of Hofbau."
THE STOLEN BODY
By H. G. WELLS
Copyright 1897, 1898, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902, and 1903 by H. G. Wells.
Copyright 1905 by Charles Scribner's Sons.
Mr. Bessel was the senior partner in the firm of Bessel, Hart, and
Brown, of St. Paul's Churchyard, and for many years he was well known
among those interested in psychical research as a liberal-minded and
conscientious investigator. He was an unmarried man, and instead of
living in the suburbs, after the fashion of his class, he occupied
rooms in the Albany, near Piccadilly. He was particularly interested
in the questions of thought transference and of apparitions of the
living, and in November, 1896, he commenced a series of experiments in
conjunction with Mr. Vincey, of Staple Inn, in order to test the
alleged possibility of projecting an apparition of one's self by force
of will through space.
Their experiments were conducted in the following manner: At a
prearranged hour Mr. Bessel shut himself in one of his rooms in the
Albany and Mr. Vincey in his sitting-room in Staple Inn, and each then
fixed his mind as resolutely as possible on the other. Mr. Bessel had
acquired the art of self-hypnotism, and, so far as he could, he
attempted first to hypnotise himself and then to project himself as a
"phantom of the living" across the intervening space of nearly two
miles into Mr. Vincey's apartment. On several evenings this was tried
without any satisfactory result, but on the fifth or sixth occasion Mr.
Vincey did actually see or imagine he saw an apparition of Mr. Bessel
standing in his room. He states that the appearance, although brief,
was very vivid and real. He noticed that Mr. Bessel's face was white
and his expression anxious, and, moreover, that his hair was
disordered. For a moment Mr. Vincey, in spite of his state of
expectation, was too surprised to speak or move, and in that moment it
seemed to him as though the figure glanced over its shoulder and
incontinently vanished.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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