In the next example, the apparition seems definitely independent of any conscious mental action on the part of the absent person; for it would be hard to attribute a special telepathic influence to some casual image of his usual resort that may have flitted across his mind, at the same time that his form appeared. The two percipients were at the time secretaries to societies of which the offices were in the same building. The narrator is Mr. R. Mouat, of 60, Huntingdon Street, Barnsbury, N. His account, which was written down soon after the occurrence, has been slightly condensed.

(329) "On Thursday, the 5th of September, 1867, about the hour of 10.45 a.m., on entering my office, I found my clerk in conversation with the porter, and the Rev. Mr. H. standing at the clerk's back. I was just on the point of asking Mr. H. what had brought him in so early (he worked in the same room as myself, but was not in the habit of coming till about midday) when my clerk began questioning me about a telegram which had missed me. The conversation lasted some minutes, and in the midst of it the porter gave me a letter which explained by whom the telegram had been sent. During this scene Mr. R., from an office upstairs, came in and listened to what was going on. On opening the letter, I immediately made known its purport, and looked Mr. H. full in the face as I spoke. I was much struck by the melancholy look he had, and observed that he was without his necktie. At this juncture Mr. R. and the porter left the room. I spoke to Mr. H., saying, ' Well, what's the matter with you? You look so sour.' He made no answer, but continued looking fixedly at me. I took up an enclosure which had accompanied the letter and read it through, still seeing Mr. H. standing opposite to me at the corner of the table.

As I laid the papers down, my clerk said, 'Here, sir, is a letter come from Mr. H.' No sooner had he pronounced the name than Mr. H. disappeared in a second. I was for a time quite dumbfounded, which astonished my clerk, who (it now turned out) had not seen Mr. H., and absolutely denied that he had been in the office that morning. The purport of the letter from Mr. H., which my clerk gave me, and which had been written on the previous day, was that, feeling unwell, he should not come to the office that Thursday, but requested me to forward his letters to him at his house.

"The next day (Friday), about noon, Mr. H. entered the office; and when I asked him where he was on the Thursday about 10.45, he replied that he had just finished breakfast, was in the company of his wife, and had never left his house during the day. I felt shy of mentioning the subject to Mr. R., but on the Monday following I could not refrain from asking him if he remembered looking in on Thursday morning. 'Perfectly,' he replied; 'you were having a long confab with your clerk about a telegram, which you subsequently discovered came from Mr. C.' On my asking him if he remembered who were present, he answered, ' The clerk, the porter, you and H.' On my asking him further, he said, ' He was standing at the corner of the table, opposite you. I addressed him, but he made no reply, only took up a book and began reading. I could not help looking at him, as the first thing that struck me was his being at the office so early, and the next his melancholy look, so different from his usual manner; but that I attributed to his being annoyed about the discussion going on.

I left him standing in the same position when I went out, followed by the porter.' On my making known to Mr. R. that Mr. H. was 14 miles off the whole of that day he grew quite indignant at my doubting the evidence of his eyesight, and insisted on the porter being called up and interrogated. The porter, however, like the clerk, had not seen the figure".

Mr. R. has supplied independent and precise corroboration of these facts, so far as he was a party to them - the one insignificant difference being that he says he did not speak to Mr. H., but "gesticulated in fun to him, pointing to Mr. M. and the clerk, who were having an altercation about a telegram; but my fun did not seem at all catching, Mr. H. apparently not being inclined, as he often was, to make fun out of surrounding circumstances." He adds that he has never experienced any other hallucination of the senses; and Mr. Mouat made a similar statement viva voce to the present writer.

Cases of this type naturally suggest the question whether they may not be parallel to those cases of casual agency (Chapter XIV (Further Visual Cases Occurring To A Single Percipient), § 5), where the same person has on several occasions, unconnected with any crisis, been the source of hallucination, now to one friend, now to another. But even supposing such an impression as the above, of an absent person who is in a normal state, to be telepathic and not purely subjective in its inception, no one on reflection will maintain that by pure accident two percipients were casually affected in this extremely rare way at the same moment. And if not, then something took place between them; which - if what one saw was not suggested to the other by verbal or physical signs - must be of the nature of thought-transference. [Case 330 is omitted].