Seen and Unseen | Page 4

was dead. I was entirely devoted to my father, who
had been father and mother to me in one, and these dreams no doubt
broke the terrible shock of his death to me. How well I remember, that
cold, dreary February morning, being hastily dressed by candle-light by
strange hands, and then my dear old nurse (who had been by his
bedside all night) coming in and telling me the sad news with tears
streaming down her cheeks. It seemed no news at the moment; and yet
I had spoken of my dreams to no one, "for fear they should come true,"
having some pathetic, childish notion that silence on my part might
avert the catastrophe. In all his previous and numerous illnesses I had
never dreamt that any special one was fatal.
During the next few years of school life my psychic faculty remained
absolutely in abeyance. In a fashionable school, surrounded by
chattering companions and the usual paraphernalia of school work,
classes, and masters, etc., I can, however, recall many a time when
suddenly everything around me became unreal and I alone seemed to
have any true existence; and even that was for the time merged in a
rather unpleasant dream, from which I hoped soon to wake up. This
sensation was quite distinct from the one--also well known to me in
those days and later--of having "done all this before," and knowing just
what somebody was about to say.
Probably both these sensations are common to most young people. It
would be interesting to note which of the two is the more universal.
I pass on now to the time when I was about eighteen years old, and a
constant visitor, for weeks and months at a time, in the house of my
godfather, the archdeacon of a northern diocese. His grandson, then a
young student at Oxford, of about my own age, must have been what
we should now call a very good sensitive. It was with him that I sat at
my first "table," more as a matter of amusement than anything else, and
certainly young Morton Freer treated the "spirits" in the most cavalier
fashion. They did not seem to resent this, and he could do pretty much
what he liked with them. This may be a good opportunity for
explaining that when I speak in this narrative of "spirits" I do so to save

constant periphrasis, and am quite consciously "begging the question"
very often, as a matter of verbal convenience.
In those days I don't think we troubled ourselves much about theories,
and when we found that Morton and I alone could move a heavy
dining-room table, or any other piece of heavy furniture quite beyond
our normal powers, practically without exerting any strength at all, we
looked upon it as an amusing experience without caring to inquire
whether the energy involved had been generated on this side the veil or
on the other side. We could certainly not have moved such weights
under ordinary circumstances, even by putting forth all our combined
strength, and we could only do so, for some mysterious reason, when
we had been "sitting at the table" beforehand. Ingenious Theories of
Human Electricity raised to a higher power by making a Human
Battery, etc. etc., were not so common then as now, and we accepted
facts without trying to solve their problems.
The dear, hospitable Archdeacon would put his venerable head inside
the door now and then, shake it at us half in fun, and yet a good deal in
earnest, and I think he was more than doubtful whether our parlour
games were quite lawful!
We were very innocent and very ignorant in those days on the subject
of psychic laws; and probably this was our salvation, for I can
remember no terrible or weird experience, such as one reads of
nowadays when tyros take to experiments.
And yet my knowledge and experiences of later days lead me to
endorse most heartily the well-known dictum of Lawrence
Oliphant--namely, that when he saw people sitting down in a casual,
irresponsible way to "get messages through a table," it reminded him
of an ignorant child going into a powder magazine with a lighted match
in its hand.
Staying in this same house, I can next recall a flying visit from a
brother of mine, who had just spent three months, on leave from India,
in America, where he had taken introductions, and had been the guest
of various hospitable naval and military men, who had shown him

round the Washington Arsenal, West Point Academy, and so forth. My
kind old host had begged him to take us on his way back to London;
and I remember well his look of utter amazement when Morton and I
had lured him to