We were looking up at the great gallery, running round the hall. It was reached by four wide flights of stairs at different corners, and it was full of all sorts of recesses, and massive pieces of old furniture and screens. On the spur of the moment I said to my host, "Wouldn't it be uncanny if we were to see a strange face looking down on us?"
To my surprise, he answered: "Oh! that has often happened. I've often seen strangers looking down. At one time I took them to be inquisitive members of my own household, whom I didn't know by sight, and one day I complained about it, to the housekeeper. She looked very much disturbed and told me she had seen the same thing herself. The house is opened on certain days to the public, and she was half inclined to think one of the visitors had escaped from the crowd, and hidden herself for several days, as it was not on a public day that the figure was seen."
"Is it always the same figure?" I asked.
"Oh, no," replied my host. "Always a different one, and always some one quite ordinary and modern looking. The strictest orders are given that none of the servants' friends are to be allowed in this part of the house, and the housekeeper has always been with us and is thoroughly trustworthy. The fact remains an unsolved mystery."
The housekeeper was a very agreeable old woman of the real, old-fashioned type. Very rustling in the evening, in a rich silk gown, and wearing some fine piece of jewelry presented to her by one or other of the crowned heads who had visited the famous house. I had asked her before I left about these mysterious appearances, and she had no explanation to offer. She had ascertained beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they had nothing to do with the household.
"They were always just ordinary looking men and women, such as one meets in the streets every day. Sometimes they seem to have hats on, sometimes their heads appear uncovered," she explained.
This fits in with a belief I have always held that we constantly rub shoulders with the disembodied, without being in the least aware of it. As the Bishop of London once said: "We will find ourselves exactly the same persons ten minutes after death as we were ten minutes before death."
There are many occasions when we cannot express feeling in intellectual terms owing to the poverty of language. One's life not being a matter of intellectual perception, but a conscious experience, little of it can be made known. The mystic life is really incommunicable.
We regard the Universe through the lens of five very imperfect senses, conscious all the time that there are certainly many more mediums for the expression of consciousness.
Perception is a manifestation of consciousness, and varies enormously in individuals, ranging often above and beneath the normal. Undoubtedly perception can be enormously extended by practice, not only in seeing material objects, but in approaching the borderland of other worlds.