one but myself and a shorthand clerk who happened to have been introduced for the first time at this sitting by me, and whose antecedents are well known to me, being present."
[Then, in response to Sir O. Lodge's request for incidents in Uncle Jerry's boyhood, 60 or 70 years before] "Uncle Jerry recalled episodes, such as swimming the creek when they were boys together, and running some risk of getting drowned; killing a cat in Smith's field; the possession of a small rifle, and of a long peculiar skin, like a snake-skin, which he thought was now in the possession of Uncle Robert.
"All these facts have been more or less completely verified. But the interesting thing is that his twin brother, from whom I got the watch, and with whom I was thus in a sort of communication, could not remember them all. He recollected something about swimming the creek, though he himself had merely looked on. He had a distinct recollection of having had the snake-skin, and of a box in which it was kept, though he does not know where it is now. But he altogether denied killing the cat, and could not recall Smith's field.
"His memory, however, is decidedly failing him, and he was good enough to write to another brother, Frank, living in Cornwall, an old sea captain, and asked if he had any better remembrance of the facts—of course not giving any inexplicable reasons for asking. The result of this enquiry was triumphantly to vindicate the existence of Smith's field as a place near their home, where they used to play, in Barking, Essex; and the killing of a cat by another brother was also recollected; while of the swimming of the creek, near a mill-race, full details were given, Frank and Jerry being the heroes of that foolhardy episode."[1]
This account may, indeed, conceivably be explained as the result of a process of telepathic conveyance from Sir Oliver Lodge's mind of things heard in boyhood and long ago forgotten. Sir O.
- ↑ Proceedings, S. P. R., vol. vi., pp. 458–60.
