‘The accident occurred between ten and a quarter past ten o’clock. My friend’s youngest sister—a young girl of twenty—is paying him a visit this week. Now, this Sunday morning she went into the kitchen at ten o’clock, looking very distressed, and said to the servants that she felt sure an accident had happened to her brother. The sister’s and servants’ versions concorded absolutely when questioned a few hours later on this coincidence.’ “The air of protection which this personification assumes is never absent; it is difficult, M. Meurice says, to convey an idea of the strange, fantastic impression which he feels, in presence of the frequent intervention of H. B., and other personifications. “This impression is the less easily understood, in so much as M. Meurice is not a spiritualist, and has received a scientific education. He refuses to accept the explanations which the personifications offer of themselves: they claim to be human beings who have once lived on earth. Up to the present they have never pretended to give us any information touching the life beyond the tomb; the indications they have given rather tend to direct our experiments, and to try to formulate premonitions. H. B. seems to have given himself the task, chiefly, of establishing his identity; this desire appears to be his leading—I scarcely dare to say generating—idea. And we are obliged to admit that from this point of view he has given some curious details. These facts constitute the intellectual phenomena, which are the dominant ones in the H. B. personification, although raps and movements without contact are also said to emanate from him sometimes. “I have given some examples of psycho-sensorial messages in the visions which I have described. These are far from being the most interesting. H. B. manifests also by automatic writing, and has given some messages of a highly interesting character in this manner. I cite the following as being the most characteristic:— “On the 27th of November 1903, towards the close of a seance, I _mentally_ asked H. B. where I happened to be, when he was laid up with a certain serious illness. The medium wrote: ‘You were a young magistrate at Blaye, near Bordeaux.’ M. Meurice knows what my career has been, but it is extremely improbable, he should have known about the illness—much less the time of the illness—of which I was thinking. At all events, the reply given to my _mental_ question was correct. Neither the conversation nor previous facts could have given the slightest clue to my question. On another occasion, automatic writing made an extremely characteristic allusion to one of H. B.’s most inveterate habits: a glass of brandy and water every afternoon at half-past five, punctually.[26] [26] The following is Dr. Maxwell’s detailed report of this incident as contained in a letter to Professor Richet:—