Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free.This is an OCR edition with typos.Excerpt from book:CHAPTER IV OF THE EPISODE OF LOUISE, AND HOW IT WAS ALL DONE THOSE who still remained sceptical were completely puzzled. Our success was due, of course, to the cause which makes all spooking mysterious— inaccurate and incomplete observation. In the first place, Alec Matthews had been guilty of a bad slip. He was certain that he had kept the board in his possession and that the mediums could not have seen it. He forgot he had come into Gatherer's room before the seance, to ask some question about a hockey match, and had carried the new board in his hand. I was sitting in the corner. He stayed in the room, standing near the door, for perhaps fifteen seconds—just enough for me to run my eye round the board. After Alec left Gatherer twitted me on being very silent, and asked if I was " homesick." I was memorizing the new position of the letters. In the next place, at the seance I was carelessly bandaged. I could see the edge of the board next me, and from that calculated the position of the other letters, so that the fact that the glass could at once write ' Yes, ask something,' was not so wonderful after all. In the third place, Little himself gave away the key to the code when he tried to tell us what B-M-X stood for. Everybody remembered that Alec had stopped him from saying what it was, but nobody seemed to notice he had begun to tell us and had given away the important fact that B stood for V. The knowledge of the position of one letter gave me a clue for reconstructing the whole board. Finally, the receding by the Spook (by going one letter to the left all the way round) was due to an accident. I had not noticed that V and D had changed places, and that the new board read V-D instead of D-V. V was the key letter given away by Little, and as I sawit in my mind's eye o...