I confess that, if Herr Parish's version were as correct as it is essentially inaccurate, his explanation would leave me doubtful. For the circumstances were that the old gentleman of the story lunched daily with the young lady's mother. Suppose that she was familiar (which she was not) with the shiny back of his waistcoat, still, she saw him daily, and daily, too, was in the way of seeing the (hypothetically) shiny surface of the sideboard. That being the case, she had, every day, the materials, subjective and objective, of the hallucination. Yet it only occurred _once_, and then it precisely coincided with the death agony of the old gentleman, and with his coatless condition. Why only that once? _C'est là le miracle!_ 'How much for this little veskit?' as the man asked David Copperfield. Herr Parish next invents a cause for an hallucination, which, I myself think, ought not to have been reckoned, because the percipient had been sitting up with the sick man. This he would class as a 'suspicious' case. But, even granting him his own way of handling the statistics, he would still have far too large a proportion of coincidences for the laws of chance to allow, if we are to go by these statistics at all. His next argument practically is that hallucinations are always only a kind of dreams.[11] He proves this by the large number of coincidental hallucinations which occurred in sleepy circumstances. One man went to bed early, and woke up early; another was 'roused from sleep;' two ladies were sitting up in bed, giving their babies nourishment; a man was reading a newspaper on a sofa; a lady was lying awake at seven in the morning; and there are eight other English cases of people 'awake' in bed during an hallucination. Now, in Dr. Parish's opinion, we must argue that they were _not_ awake, or not much; so the hallucinations were mere dreams. Dreams are so numerous that coincidences in dreams can be got rid of as pure flukes. People may say, to be sure, 'I am used to dreams, and don't regard them; _this_ was something solitary in my experience.' But we must not mind what people say.