An account

August 11th, 1883. My wife's great-uncle was private secretary to Warren Hastings in India, and one day, when sitting in Council, they all saw a figure pass through the Council-room into an inner room, from which there was no other exit. One of the Council exclaimed, ' Good God ! that is my father.' Search was made in the inner room, but nothing could be found, and Warren Hastings, turning to his secretary, said, ' Cator, make a note of this, and put it with the minutes of to-day's Council.' As a small incident in the story, it was noticed that the figure had one of our modern pot hats. ' Some months after, a ship arrived bringing the news of the old gentleman's death and the first pot hats that had been seen in India. I simply tell it you as I heard it from a Mr. Sparkes, who is now dead, and who, as well as my wife, was a great-nephew to — and probably heard it from — the old Mr. Cator who was present at the Council. I never heard him say whether he heard it direct from Mr. Cator, but I think it likely, as he was rather nearly related, and from his ase must have known him. 152 GENERAL CRITICISM OF THE EVIDENCE [chap. Precisely similar details were given by Mr. Sparkes to the Rev. B. Wrey Savile, who has published the case in his book on Apparitions ; in this account the Member of Council who recognised his father figures as Mr. Shakespeare. Now the official minutes of the Supreme Council have been searched for us; but it does not appear either that Mr. Shakespeare was a Member of Council at the time, or that Mr. Cator was Hastings' private secretary, though he was certainly in the Company's service. We learn, however, from the Superintendent of Records at the India Office that it is believed that the registers of the Company's servants in India at that early date were not always quite accurate ; so that these discoveries would not alone have thrown serious suspicion on the report. And the chimney-pot hat seemed, at any rate, something respectable to stand by. The phantom, in fact, owed his character to his hat ; for it is hard to imagine how Mr. Cator or Mr. Sparkes could have gratuitously introduced such a feature into the story. But the curious perfection of the detail as to the simultaneous arrival of the news and of the real hats at once suggests scrutiny of the dates. All the accounts of chimney-pot hats that we have been able to find agree that they came into use between 1790 and 1795, though they seem to have been worn in France as early as 1787. They cannot, therefore, have reached India be