But presently he again heard “Papa, papa!” and now both voices spoke. Upon which—exclaiming, “I can stand this no longer”—he started up, and, drawing back the curtains, saw both children in their night-dresses, standing near the bed. He immediately jumped out; whereupon they retreated slowly, and with their faces toward him, to the window, where they disappeared. He says that the circumstance made a great impression upon him at the time; and, indeed, that it was one that could never be effaced; but he did not know what to think of it, not believing in ghosts, and therefore concluded it must have been some extraordinary spectral illusion, especially as his wife heard nothing. It may have been so; but that circumstance by no means proves it. From these varying degrees of susceptibility, or affinity, there seems to arise another consequence, namely, that more than one person may see the same object, and yet see it differently, and I mention this particularly, because it is one of the objections that unreflecting persons make to phenomena of this kind, second sight especially. In the remarkable instance which is recorded to have occurred at Ripley, in the year 1812, to which I shall allude more particularly in a future chapter, much stress was laid on the fact, that the first seer said, “Look at those beasts!” While the second answered, they were “not beasts, but men.” In a former chapter, I mentioned the case of a lady, on board a ship, seeing and feeling a sort of blue cloud hanging over her, which afterward, as it retired, assumed a human form, though still appearing a vapory substance. Now, possibly, had her receptivity, or the rapport, been greater, she might have seen the distinct image of her dying friend. I have met with several instances of these cloudy figures being seen, as if the spirit had built itself up a form of atmospheric air; and it is remarkable, that when other persons perceived the apparitions that frequented the Seeress of Prevorst, some saw those as cloudy forms, which she saw distinctly attired in the costume they wore when alive; and thus, on some occasions, apparitions are represented as being transparent, while on others they have not been distinguishable from the real corporeal body. All these discrepancies, and others, to be hereafter alluded to, are doubtless only absurd to our ignorance; they are the results of physical laws, as absolute, though not so easily ascertained, as those by which the most ordinary phenomena around us are found explicable.