“Next day I met one of the niggers who was sent to lend him a hand, and asked results.
“‘Master,’ said the nigger, ‘Bolter is a devil! He sees at night. When the sheep ran away to right or left in the dark, he told us where to follow.’”
“He heard them, I suppose,” said I.
“Maybe, but you must be sharp to have sharper senses than these niggers. Anyhow, that was not Bolter’s account of it. When I saw him and spoke to him he said simply, ‘Yes, that when excited or interested to seek or find anything in obscurity the object became covered with a dim glow of light, which rendered it visible’. ‘But things in a pocket.’ ‘That also,’ said he. ‘Curious isn’t it? Probably the Röntgen rays are implicated therein, eh?’”
“Did you ever read Dr. Gregory’s Letters on Animal Magnetism?”
“The cove that invented Gregory’s Mixture?”
“Yes.”
“Beast he must have been. No, I never read him.”
“He says that Major Buckley’s hypnotised subjects saw hidden objects in a blue light—mottoes inside a nut, for example.”
“Röntgen rays, for a fiver! But Bolter said nothing about seeing blue light. Well, after three or four séances Bolter used to be very nervous and unwilling to sleep alone, so I once went with him to his one-roomed hut. We turned into the same bed. I was awakened later by a noise and movement in the room. Found the door open; the full moon streaming in, making light like day, and the place full of great big black dogs—well, anyhow there were four or five! They were romping about, seemingly playing. One jumped on the bed, another rubbed his muzzle on mine! (the bed was low, and I slept outside). Now I never had anything but love for dogs of any kind, and as—n’est-ce pas?—love casts out fear, I simply got up, turned them all out, shut the door, and turned in again myself. Of course my idea was that they were flesh and blood, and I allude to physical fear.