The relation of the three unusual incidents following these introductory words are only simple statements of facts for each reader to solve in his own way. Concerning them I have no theory whatever, and avow emphatically an entire disbelief in their sometimes alleged supernatural origin. That, for the present at least, they are inexplicable must be admitted, but that they will always remain within the realm of mysteries beyond the power of solution is very doubtful.

Up to the present time many accepted, 188 or rather seeming, mysteries, which, with the assistance of ages, have crystallized into form, have been permitted to pass unchallenged, but the time has arrived when the old fields, now almost sacred groves, where superstition has taken root and blossomed, are about to be explored. The almost omnipotent search-light of science is turning its rays into the dark nooks and corners of complacent ignorance, greatly to the discomfiture of many old theories and beliefs, whose foundations are as unsubstantial as dreams.

Until the possibly far-off culmination of the great scientific epoch, new mysteries known only to the laboratories of Nature will continue to be born. But those who have watched the progress of scientific achievement, through the last half of the Nineteenth Century, must believe that, within the 189 next like period, the visible manifestations of secrets coming from the bosom of Nature (of which the outer shell now only is seen) will have been ascertained to belong to a previously undiscovered series of natural phenomena.

We know as a certain fact of the existence of a natural element of power called electricity, but what is it, and whence does it come? To the ignorant it performs miracles in an apparently supernatural way, while to the intelligent it is regarded as a subtle natural force coming from the universal laboratory of boundless nature and as unending as time itself. In electricity, as in many other manifestations of the forces of nature, we see only results, and know little or nothing of the first cause. The time, however, let us hope, is not far off when origins will be as easily demonstrable as is now the seeing of effects we cannot understand.
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Present indications point to the early solution of all superstitions, many of which for centuries have construed some of the simplest happenings, which could not upon any known principles be explained, into demonstrations flowing from supernatural sources. Superstition must certainly fall before the great and impartial sweep of modern research. In at least one direction, the battle will be of long duration, but at the end of the conflict, the vicious old fabric coined out of ages of falsehood as old as our civilization, sustained by centuries of superstitiou............