There were thousands who watched for that ghost the following night, but it did not appear. The affair naturally was the subject of widespread newspaper comment; but when after a few days no one else had seen the ghost, the newspapers began turning from the serious to the jocular angle. * * * * * Then, early in March, the second ghost was reported. In the Eastern Hemisphere this time. It was discovered in midair, near the Boro Badur, in Java. Thousands of people watched it for over an hour that evening. It was the figure of a man, seated on something invisible in the air nearly a hundred feet above the ground. It sat motionless as though contemplating the crowd of watchers beneath it. And then it was joined by other figures! Another man, and a woman. The reports naturally were confused, contradictory. But they agreed in general that the other figures came from the dimness of distance; came walking up some invisible slope until they met the seated figure. Like a soundless motion picture projected into the air, the crowd on the ground saw the three figures in movement; saw them--the reports said--conversing; saw them at last move slowly backward and downward within the solid outlines of the great temple, until finally in the distance they disappeared. Another apparition was seen in Nome; another in Cape Town. From everywhere they were now reported. Some by daylight, but most at night. By May the newspapers featured nothing else. Psychical research societies sprang into unprecedented prominence and volubility. Learned men of spiritualistic tendencies wrote reams of ponderous essays which the newspapers eagerly printed. Amid the reports now, the true from the false became increasingly difficult to distinguish. Notoriety seekers, cranks, and quacks of every sort burst into print with weird tales of ghostly manifestations. Hysterical young girls, morbidly seeking publicity, told strange tales which in more sober days no newspaper would have dared to print. And in every country charlatans were doing a thriving business with the trappings of spiritualism. In late July the thing took another turn. A new era began--a sinister era which showed the necessity for something more than all this aimless talk. Four men were walking one night along a quiet country road near a small English village. They were men of maturity, reputable, sober, middle-aged citizens. Upon the road level they observed the specters of four or five male figures, which instead of remaining motionless rushed forward to the attack. These ghosts were ponderable! The men distinctly felt them; a vague feeling, indescribable, perhaps as though something soft had brushed them. The fight, if such it could be called, amounted to nothing. The men flailed their arms in sudden fear; and the apparitions sped away. Greenish, more solid-looking than those heretofore seen.