In another of the carriage-cases, the hallucination was of a more bizarre sort, the coachman and footman on the box having black faces, and the four ladies inside being dressed completely in black. The vehicle passed the window without producing any sound on the gravel. In a third case one of the percipients was altogether apart from the three others - they seeing the phantasmal carriage pass the window, and she meeting it some way down the road. In a fourth case, our informant - Mr. Paul Bird, of 39, Strand, Calcutta - followed a phantom gharrie for 100 yards, into the very portico of Hastings House at Alipore, while the same vehicle was watched in its approach by his wife from a window. But more of a puzzle even than the carriage-cases is a narrative received from two daughters of a well-known clergyman - neither romantic nor superstitious witnesses - who describe a vast swarm of soundless phantasmal shapes, dressed in old-fashioned garments, most of them dwarfish, and two with sparks round their faces, by which they and a maid were once accompanied for about 200 yards in a lane near Oxford. "One might imagine it to be a kind of mirage; only the whole appearance [owing to the dresses] was so unlike what one would have seen in any town at the time we saw it."1 If this must be regarded as illusion, because it occurred in misty moonlight, yet an identity of impression is described which still suggests mental infection: - "If one saw a man, all saw a man; if one saw a woman, all saw a woman; and so on".

I pass by, however, as necessarily inconclusive, the greater number of out instances of collective impression where the appearance was seen out of doors in imperfect light - though there is not one of them which would not be decidedly more remarkable, as a specimen of joint illusion, than any that I have found recorded in print. The following daylight example is from the Misses Montgomery, of Beaulieu, Drogheda.

"March 2nd, 1884.

(317) "About the year 1875, I and my sister (we were about 13 years old then) were driving home in the tax-cart one summer afternoon about 4 o'clock, when there suddenly appeared, floating over the hedge, a female figure moving noiselessly across the road; the figure was in white, and the body in a slanting position, some 10 feet above the ground. The horse suddenly stopped and shook with fright, so much so that we could not get it on. I called out to my sister: 'Did you see that? ' and she said she had, and so did the boy Caffrey, who was in the cart. The figure went over the hedge, on the other side of the road, and passed over a field, till we lost sight of it in a plantation beyond. Altogether, I suppose, we watched it for a couple of minutes. It never touched the ground at all, but floated calmly along. On reaching home we told our mother of what we had seen, and we were perfectly certain it was not a mere delusion or illusion, nor an owl, or anything of the kind.

"I have never seen anything like this nor any apparition before or since. We were all in good health at the time, and no one had suggested any grounds for the apparition beforehand; but we afterwards heard that the road was supposed to be haunted, and a figure had been seen by some of the country folks. "violet Montgomery.

"Sidney Montgomery".

Professor Barrett, who knows the witnesses, adds that Mrs. Montgomery remembers the incident well, and the terror her children were in. They both agreed as to the reality of the figure. Caffrey has gone to America, and been lost sight of.

No one probably will suppose that the witnesses here have agreed to repeat, for our benefit, a romance which they fabricated for their mother's at the time; and however much allowance be made for childish terror or exaggeration, the community of experience in broad daylight seems to exceed what can be attributed to verbal suggestions, passed from one to another, a propos of a fleece of cloud or an owl. We have a very similar instance from Mr. W. S. Soutar, solicitor, of Blairgowrie, N.B. - who records that he and his brother, as young boys, at play behind their father's house, in the gloaming of a summer evening, "both saw an apparition in the shape of a female figure, plainly dressed, with a striped apron over the face, and which glided, without any apparent movement of the feet, from the road till about half-way between it and the hedge surrounding a shrubbery near the house, when the figure suddenly disappeared. There was no cover near, behind which the person (if in the body) could hide, the spot where it disappeared being bare and open." This case, however, is remote, and the second witness is dead.

A much more striking example (brought to our notice by Mr. A. Farquharson, of North Bradley, Trowbridge, Wilts) is one where the senses of two adults - a gentleman-farmer, described as a hard-headed unromantic business man and his wife - were similarly deluded in an exposed space and in broad daylight; but the timidity of the witnesses precludes me from giving details.

1 This case, which in brief abstract may sound like a frightened girl's story, will not, I think, produce that impression in the complete account, which may be found in the Proceedings of the S.P.R., vol. iii., p. 77.

To come, however, to indoor cases, of a less dubious type; As a rule, the figure seen (just as in purely subjective cases occurring to a single percipient) is unrecognised. The following account, though remote, is first-hand, and at any rate deserves quotation. It occurs in Letters of Philip, 2nd Earl of Chesterfield (1829), p. 11. The incident was recorded by Lord Chesterfield in an MS. volume containing his letters and "notes for my remembrance of things and accidents, as they yearly happen to me".

(318) "A very odd accident this year [1652] befell mee, for being come about a law sute to London ... I, waking in the morning about 8 o'clock, . . . plainly saw, within a yard of my bedside, a thing all white like a stands sheet, with a knot atop of it, about 4 or 5 foot high, who I considered a good while, and did rayse myself up in my bed to view the better. At last I thrust out both my hands to catch hold of it, but, in a moment, like a shadow, it slid to the feet of the bed, out of we I, leap after it, c.f see it no more. . . Doubting least something might have happened to my wife, I rid home that day to Petworth in Sussex, where I had left her with her father, the Earl of Northumberland, and as I was going upstairs to her chamber, I met one of my footmen, who told me that he was comming to me with a packet of letters, the wh I having taken from him went to my wife, who I found in good health, being . . . with Lady Essex, her sister, and another gentlewoman, one Mrs. Ramsey . . . They all asked me what made me to come home so much sooner than I intended.

Whereupon I told them what had happened to me that morng; which they all wondering at desired me to open and read the letter that I had taken from the footman, which I immediately did, and read my wife's letter to mee aloud, wherein she desired my speedy returns as fears that some ill wd happen to mee, because that morning shee had seen a thing all in white, with a black face, standing by her bedside. . . . By examining all particulars we found that the same day, the same hour, and (as near as can be computed) the same minute, all that had happened to me had befallen her, being fortie miles asunder. The Lady Essex and Mrs. Ramsey were witnesses to both our relations".

Here, it will be seen, the two percipients were widely separated, which excludes the idea of joint illusion or of verbal suggestion.