Raps are an example of the simplest and most frequent manifestation.

We shall not multiply the examples and witnesses, in which literature abounds. We shall merely cite a few as types, choosing preferably those which have the advantage of being related by well-known persons.1

Dear Master and Friend:

It was in 1871 I was at the age when one gathers the little flowers of the field, as you gather the stars of the infinite: but during this time of passionate youth, I wrote an article which earned for me an imprisonment of several years. Everything comes to him, who has not learned to wait. I was in the prison of St. Peter at Marseilles. There I found a certain Gaston Cremieux condemned to death. I loved him very much, because we had had the same dreams and fallen upon the same hard reality.

In our prison, at the hour of outdoor exercise, it often happened that we discussed the question of God and the immortal soul. One day, when several comrades had proclaimed themselves atheists and materialists with a vehemence out of the ordinary, I reminded them, on receiving a sign from Cremieux, that it was reprehensible on their part to speak thus in the presence of a prisoner condemned to death who believed in God and in the immortality of the soul.

The condemned man said to me smilingly: "Thank you, my friend, when they shoot me, I will give you the proof of that immortality by appearing to you in your cell."

1 L'Inconnu, p. 76.

On the morning of the 3rd of November, at dawn, I was suddenly aroused by a series of sharp little knocks, given on my table. I turned around, the sound ceased, and I went to sleep. A few minutes later the same noise recommenced. I jumped from my bed and planted myself half awake, before the table: the noise continued. This was repeated two or three times, always under the same conditions, in the same manner.

On awakening each morning, it was my habit to go, with the connivance of a friendly keeper, to the cell of Gaston Cremieux. . . . Alas, there were seals on the door and I saw, by looking through the peep hole, that the prisoner was no longer there. I had hardly made this discovery when the keeper threw himself into my arms. "We shot him this morning at daybreak, but he died courageously." This is my story. I am sending it to you just as it came from my pen. I was in my normal state, I had no suspicion of the execution and I heard perfectly the series of warnings. Here is the naked truth.

Clovis Hugues.

Without doubt several isolated cases of this sort would not be of great value, but a multitude of analogous cases, and even more complicated ones, always coinciding with death, do not permit us to doubt that we here find ourselves in the presence of some of the greatest mysteries of the Beyond.

The clairvoyant of Prevort said also, that the nervous spirit may produce other effects. "Souls," she said, "may not only speak, but are capable of producing sounds such as sighs, rustling of silk or rattling of paper, knocks on the wall and on the furniture, sounds of sand, of pebbles or of the shuffling of shoes on the ground: they are capable of moving objects, be they ever so heavy, of opening and closing doors."

"The nearer dissolution," said she, "the stronger and the louder are the sounds that they are capable of making, by the aid of air, or by their nervous spirit, and in truth, we find again all these forms of manifestations in the spontaneous phenomena."

If a disincarnated spirit may arrange physical conditions which permit him to knock on material things, an intelligent being may be able to secure a better effect than knocking, for instance, by sounding a note on the piano. We have examples of this sort. L'Inconnu, page 108:

About a year and a half ago, my father, a visiting cousin and my sister, were conversing in the dining-room. These three persons were in the room alone, when suddenly they heard the sound of the piano in the drawing-room. Much perplexed my sister took the lamp, went to the drawing-room, saw perfectly the keys rising and falling, and heard sounds.1

She returned and recounted what she had seen. The others at first laughed at her story, thinking that a mouse was at the bottom of the affair: but as my sister was possessed of excellent eyesight and was not superstitious in the least, they thought it very strange. Moreover a week later a letter coming from New York, announced to us, the death of an old uncle who lived in that city. But more extraordinary still, three days after the arrival of the letter, the piano again began to play and, as on the first occasion, an announcement of death came to us a week later, that of my aunt, this time.

1 M. Victorien Sardou has reported to me an analogous fact. Note by Flammarion.

My uncle and aunt were a devoted couple, who had possessed a great attachment for each other, for their parents, and for the Juras, their place of origin.

The piano never again played by itself. The witnesses of this scene will testify to you of the matter whenever you may wish it. We live in the country near Neufchatel and I assure you that we are not neurasthenics.

Edward Paris,

Painter, Neufchatel, Switzerland.

It should be noticed that all these spontaneous facts which occur unexpectedly to families, do not differ from the series of effects produced by mediums.

A clairvoyant such as Eusapia may strike a note upon a piano, sound the chords of an instrument, turn a key at a distance, open and close the door of a wardrobe, under the best conditions of control, but these effects have only been obtained at a short distance, the dynamic power and the invisible organ residing in the physical body from which they were exteriorized. But the complete exteriorization on the part of a deceased man makes his field of action unlimited in space: it seems however to be limited in time to the few days which follow death.