In this kind of thing it is our duty to stick to known causes before admitting unknown, and my first supposition was that Wilkinson had primed himself with information. He could have ascertained most of the things by local inquiry, though it would not be very easy, for my mother had been dead twenty-two years, and only middle-aged or elderly people would remember her. Further interviews with him, however, soon carried me beyond the fraud theory--for holding which I now apologise to him, feeling considerably ashamed--for he gave me messages from many people whose association with me I feel sure he did not know, and also some family matter of a very private kind, characteristic of the spirit who purported to be communicating, but known to only four living people. I then fell back on telepathy, assuming that the medium was reading my mind. But, pursuing my investigations, I received information which I did not know but which turned out true. For example, Wilkinson on one occasion described a Ruth and Jacob Robertshaw, giving details about them and saying that Ruth had a very spiritual appearance, with a sort of radiance about her, indicating that she had been a very good woman, and giving other particulars. All this meant nothing to me, for the names were unknown. But, as I had on some other occasions found that spirits were described who were relatives of my last visitor, I asked the person who had last entered the room--except inhabitants of the house--whether she had known people of these names. It turned out that they were connexions of hers with whom she had been in close touch during life, and everything said by the medium was correct. Now in the first place this incident ruled out fraud, for Miss North's visit had occurred three days before, and Wilkinson would have had to have detectives watching both doors of my house, from first thing in the morning to the last thing at night, to find out who my last visitor had been; or he would have had to be in league with a servant or a neighbour, and even thus could hardly have succeeded, for servants are sometimes out--moreover, similar things have happened during the _régime_ of different servants--and neighbours could not easily watch both doors during dark winter evenings. Further, our neighbours are friends of ours, non-spiritualists, and not acquainted with Wilkinson. And, after getting to know who my last visitor was, information about her deceased relatives would have had to be hunted up. I could give further reasons for believing that fraud was an untenable hypothesis, but I must be brief. What, next, about telepathy? Well, I had no conscious knowledge of these people, so the medium could not have got his information from my conscious mind. It is possible to assume that I knew it subliminally, and that the medium abstracted it from those hidden levels of my mind. This is a guess, but a legitimate guess. It is the guess that Miss Dougall (author of _Pro Christo et Ecclesia_)