"'To identify one of these bars of music would be a good test,' said Blake, 'but to find that _etude_ at Schumann's would be a triumph.' "'To find the manuscript fragment would be still more convincing,' was my answer. "Imagine my disappointment when, in answer to my inquiry, Schumann replied that no such _etude_ had ever been in his hands, and Alexander's family reported that no fragment called 'Unghere' could be found among the composer's manuscripts." Fowler shared my regret. "What about the other messages? Were they all disappointing?" "No; some of them were not. The most intimate were true; and a signature which came on the slate under test conditions, and which I valued very little at the moment, turned out to be almost the exact duplicate of Alexander's signature as he used to write it when a youth twenty years ago. As a matter of fact, it closely resembled the signature appended to a framed letter which used to hang upon the wall of his study. But, even so, its reproduction under these conditions is sufficiently puzzling." "What was Blake's conclusion? Did he put the same value upon it all that you did?" "Yes, I think he was quite as deeply impressed as I. He said the music seemed like Alexander's music, somehow distorted by the medium through which it came. 'It was like seeing Alexander through a pane of crinkly glass,' he put it. And he added: 'I had the sense of being in long-distance contact with the composer himself.' He had no doubt of the supernormal means through which our writing came, but he remains doubtful of the value of the music as evidence of 'Ernest's' return from the world of shadows." "Have you tried to secure more of the music?" Fowler asked. "No, not specifically; but I've had one further inconclusive sitting since then with Mrs. Hartley. Almost immediately 'Ernest' whispered a greeting and said: '_I want to go on with that music, Garland. I want to put B and D and A into the first bar--it's only a bare sketch as it stands._' "To this I replied: 'I can't do it, 'Ernest.' It's beyond me. Wait till I can get Blake again.' "This ended his attempt, although he was 'terribly anxious,' so the psychic said. I am going to try for the completion of this score through another psychic. If I can get that eighth bar taken up and carried on by 'Ernest' through another psychic the case will become complicated. "I have gone into detail in my account of this experiment, for the reason that it illustrates very aptly the inextricable tangle of truth and error which most 'spirit communications' present. It typifies in little the elusive problem of spirit identification which many a veteran investigator is still at work upon, after years of study. Maxwell gives a case of long-continued unintentional and unconscious deception of the general kind which went far to prevent his acceptance of the spirit hypothesis."