I do not believe that the truth is as hideous as this. Our unknown guest does not deceive itself any more than it deceives us; but it is we who deceive ourselves. It has not the stage to itself; and its voice is not the voice that sounds in our ears, which were never made to catch the echoes of a world that is not like ours. If it could speak to us itself and tell us what it knows, we should probably at that instant cease to be on this earth. But we are immersed in our bodies, entombed prisoners with whom it cannot communicate at will. It roams around the walls, it utters warning cries. It knocks at every door, but all that reaches us is a vague disquiet, an indistinct murmur that is sometimes translated to us by a half-awakened gaoler who, like ourselves, is a lifelong captive. The gaoler does his best; he has his own way of speaking, his familiar expressions; he knows, and, with the aid of the words which he possesses and those which he hears repeated, he tries to make us understand what he hardly understands himself. He does not know exactly whence the sounds come which he hears; and, according as tempests, wars or riots happen to be uppermost at the moment, he attributes them to the winds, to tramping soldiers or to frenzied crowds. In other words and speaking without metaphor, it is the medium who draws from his habitual language and from that suggested to him by his audience the wherewithal to clothe and identify the strange presentiments, the unfamiliar visions that come from some unknown region. If he believes that the dead survive, he will naturally imagine that it is the dead who speak to him. If he has a favourite spirit, angel, demon or god, he will express himself in its name; if he has no preconceived opinion, he will not even allude to the origin of the revelations which he is making. The inarticulate language of the subconsciousness necessarily borrows that of the normal consciousness; and the two become confused into a sort of shifting and multiform jargon. And our unknown guest, which is not thinking of delivering a course of lectures upon its entity, but simply giving us as best it can a more or less warning or mark of its existence, seems to care but little as to the garments in which it is rigged out, having indeed no choice in the matter, for, either because it is unable to manifest itself or because we are incapable of understanding it, it has to be content with whatever comes to hand. Besides, if we attribute too exclusively to the spirits that which comes from another quarter, the mistake is doubtless no great one in its eyes; for it is not madness to believe that it lives with that which does not die in the dead even as with that which does not die in ourselves, with that which does not descend into the grave even as with that which does not take flesh at the hour of birth. 6