In earlier times I used to go hunting alone, without a dog and often without a rifle. I wandered about at haphazard (it was in Denmark), and once as I was standing in a glade a fox jumped up suddenly beside me. He looked me in the face, in full sunlight, at a distance of about twenty steps. I stood motionless, and the fox continued to search the ground hunting for mice. I stooped to pick up a stone. Then it was his turn to make himself invisible, for he vanished in an instant without my seeing how he did so. When I searched the ground, I found there no trace of a fox-hole, and not even a bush behind which he might have hidden. He had vanished without the help of his legs. Here and there in the marshy meadows on the banks of the Danube herons often build their nests, and they are extremely shy birds. In spite of that, I could often surprise them without hiding myself. As long as I kept motionless, I could stand and watch them. Sometimes they even flew close over my head. No one would believe me when I related this, least of all sportsmen, and I concluded therefore that the matter was something above the ordinary. When I told this to my friend the theosophist in Lund, he remembered an occurrence to which he could never find the key. A workman whom he knew visited him, saying that he had found an antique work of art for sale, and asked him for an advance of five crowns. After the man had received the commission to buy it he had disappeared, and could be found nowhere for three whole months. One Sunday evening the theosophist and his wife were going down a back street, when he saw the man a little before him on the same pavement. "Now I have the fellow!" he exclaimed. He let go of his wife's arm, and hastened his steps, when suddenly the other disappeared, as if he had evaporated. As usual in such cases, the theosophist believed he was the victim of a delusion. At the same time there was no one else in the street, so that the possibility of a mistaken identity was excluded. Such is the bare fact. To explain the inexplicable is a contradiction in terms. There was there no open door nor window nor cellar hole into which the man might have slipped and hidden himself. When it is said that some human beings have the power to divert the visible light-rays from their proper direction, that is to say, to alter the quantity of refraction,--does this heap of words explain the problem, the stress of which lies in the Why and the Wherefore? The only supposition left is, that it was a miracle! Let it pass for such till we obtain further information, and, while we wait, let us collect data, and not attempt to refute them. V MY INCREDULOUS FRIEND'S TROUBLES