This I discovered, not at once, but gradually. She would emit a stream of sounds in the trance state--I can hardly call it _speech_, so murmurous, yet guttural, was the utterance, mixed with puffy breath-sounds at the languid lips. This state was accompanied by an intense contraction of the pupils, absence of the knee-jerk, considerable rigor, and a rapt and arrant expression. I got into the habit of sitting long hours at her bed-side, quite fascinated by her, trying to catch the import of that opiate and visionary language which came puffing and fluttering in deliberate monotone from her lips. Gradually, in the course of months, my ear learned to detect the words; "the veil was rent" for me also; and I was able to follow somewhat the course of her musing and wandering spirit. At the end of six months I heard her one day repeat some words which were familiar to me. They were these: "Such were the arts by which the Romans extended their conquests, and attained the palm of victory; and the concurring testimony of different authors enables us to describe them with precision..." I was startled: they are part of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," which I easily guessed that she had never read. I said in a stern voice: "Where are you?" She replied, "Us are in a room, eight hundred and eleven miles above. A man is writing. Us are reading." I may tell you two things: first, that in trance she never spoke of herself as "I," nor even as "we," but, for some unknown reason, in the _objective_ way, as "_us_": "us are," she would say--"us will," "us went"; though, of course, she was an educated lady, and I don't think ever lived in the West of England, where they say "us" in that way; secondly, when wandering in the past, she always represented herself as being "_above_" (the earth?), and higher the further back in time she went; in describing present events she appears to have felt herself _on_ (the earth); while, as regards the future, she invariably declared that "_us_" were so many miles "within" (the earth). To her excursions in this last direction, however, there seemed to exist certain fixed limits: I say seemed, for I cannot be sure, and only mean that, in spite of my efforts, she never, in fact, went far in this direction. Three, four thousand "miles" were common figures on her lips in describing her distance "above"; but her distance "within" never got beyond sixty-three. Usually, she would say twenty, twenty-five. She appeared, in relation to the future, to resemble a diver in the deep sea, who, the deeper he strives, finds a more resistant pressure, till, at no great depth, resistance becomes prohibition, and he can no further strive.