The Argosy — page 309: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A Great Mystery. 291 ‘Johnny, though these things are, I cannot explain them. Go up to your bed now and getto sleep. As I shall goto mine. You shall know about Janet in the morning. She will take no harm if left alone: she has taken none hitherto.” It was a fact. Janet Carey had done it all in her sleep. And what she had been searching for was a bank-note. In the place where she had been living as nursery governess, she had contrived to lose a bank-note of value, belonging to her mistress, who accused her of faking it. Naturally timid, and her spirit beaten down by circumstances, it had a grave effect upon her. She searched for it incessantly ; day after day, just as we had seen her searching in her sleep ; and then fell into a fever—which was only saved by great care from settling on the brain. When well enough, Miss Cattledon had her removed to London to Miss Deveen’s ; but the stigma still clung to her, and the incipient fever seemed still to hover about her. The day Wiliam Whitney left, she moved from Miss Cattledon’s room to the one he had occupied : and that night, being unrestrained, she went down in her sleep to search. ‘The situation of the room in which the note had been lost was precisely similar to this breakfast-room at Miss Deveen’s —in her troubled sleep, poor girl, she must have taken it for the same, and crept down, still asleep, to renew the endless search she had made when awake. The night the policeman was watching in the summer house, Lettice sat up with Janet ; so that night nothing occurred. Lettice said afterwards that she twice got out of bed tn her sleep and seemed to be making for the door, but Lettice guided her back to bed again. And so there was the elucidation : and Janet was just as unconscious of what she had done as the bed-post. | A doctor was called in—for the brain-fever, escaped, appeared to be fastening on her in earnest now. He gave it as his opinion that she was no natural sleep-walker, but that the mind’s disturbance had so acted on the brain and system, coupled witlt her fright at meeting the policeman at the Colosseum, as to have induced the result. At any rate, whatever may have caused it, and strange though it was, I have only given facts. The explanation has been a hurried one from want of space. Perhaps you may hear more of Janet Carey sometime. Jounny Luptow. COMIC OOOKS. EO mn —_)