number would be easily got from a body like the Shakers, but it is
probably harder to collect an efficient gang elsewhere. Indeed there is,
the writer believes, evidence that only one such gang exists, and its
members are possibly all British subjects of various colours. It is
strange there have been no informers. The failure of the minor gang at
B---- to fairly beat Miss Freer's party as they had beaten the family who
lived in the house the year before, made them furious, and their attacks
on the weak secular priests and on a French lady of high courage but weak
health, were particularly desperate. How far the latter's health was
undermined, and her death brought about by them, is uncertain. She had
the shock of the fire at the Paris charity bazaar to break her down. She
lost relations there. Miss Freer sometimes writes as if ghosts and
spirits were possible. In her essays, on page 52, she says "naughty girls
or spirits"--the collation is perhaps sufficient to condemn the latter
alternative. But her remark about a lady medium whom she compares to a
gentleman jockey, and who had a maid of the Catholic faith, and that this
fact had an effect on the later proceedings, reads as if she were not
wanting in scepticism. Probably Miss Freer, subject to thought
transference, and yet a thought transferrer, as she is, was interested in
the effect on Miss "K." of the Catholic maid-servant. Nothing more
interesting than the transfer of thought by Miss Freer to a friend, who
therefore saw candles lighted on a lunch table, could be found, but here
again the experience seems simply hypnotic. The chapters in her essays on
visualising,[12] on "how it once came into my head," are very valuable.
Those on hauntings are grave and gay, comments on realities and errors
and superstitious, sometimes charming, beliefs. Miss Freer says of the
visions which she sees of persons in the crystal, or otherwise, that they
are (1) visions of the living--clairvoyant or telepathic; (2) visions of
the departed, having no obvious relation to time and space; (3) visions
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