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neighboring mountains. Two days later, three of them were found dead.”
    Mrs. Kasznica was alive. She told that all were climbing, and were in good condition, when suffocation came upon them. “A stifling wind,” she thought. One after another they had dropped unconscious. The post-mortem examinations revealed nothing that indicated deaths by suffocation, nor anything else that could be definitely settled upon. “Some newspapers suggest a crime, but so far the case remains a mystery.”
    There have been cases that have been called mysterious, though they seem explicable enough in known circumstances of human affairs. See a story in the New York World Telegram, March 9, 1931—about thirty men and women at work in the Howard Clothes Company factory, Nassau Street, Brooklyn—sudden terror and a panic of these people, to get to the street. The place was filled with a pungent, sickening odor. In the street, men and women collapsed, or reeled, and wandered away, in a semi-conscious condition. Several dozen of them were carried into stores, where they were given first-aid treatment, until ambulances arrived.
    The phenomenon occurred in the second floor of the Cary Building, occupied by the clothing company. Nobody in any other part of the building was affected. All gas fixtures in the factory were intact. No gas bomb was found. Nothing was found out. But, considering many crimes of this period, the suspicion is strong that in some way, as an expression of human hatred, of origin in industrial troubles, a volume of poisonous gas had been discharged into this factory.
    And it may be that, in terms of revenges, we are on the track of a general expression, even if we think of a hate that could pursue people far up on a mountainside.
    In hosts of minds, today, are impressions that the word “eerie” means nothing except convenience to makers of crossword puzzles. There are gulfs of the unaccountable, but they are bridged by terminology. Four persons were taken from a wedding party to hospitals. Well, if not another case of such jocularity as mixing brickbats with confetti, it was ice cream again, and ptomaine poisoning. There is such a satisfaction in so explaining, and showing that one knows better than to sound the p in ptomaine, that probably vast holes of ignorance always will be bridged by very slender pedantries. Asphyxiation has seduced hosts of suspicions that would be resolute against such a common explanation as “gas poisoning.”
    New York Sun, May 22, 1928—story from the town of Newton, Mass. In this town, a physician was, by telephone, called to the home of William M. Duncan. There was nobody to meet him at the front door, but he got into the house. He called, but nobody answered. There seemed to be nobody at home, but he went through the house. He came to a room, upon the floor of which were lying four bodies. There was no odor of gas, but the doctor worked over the four, as if upon cases of asphyxiation, and they revived, and tried to explain. Duncan had gone to this room, and, upon entering it, had dropped, unconscious. Wondering at what was delaying him, his wife had followed, and down she had fallen. One of his sons came next, and, upon entering this room, had fallen to the floor. The other son, by chance, went to this room, and felt something overcoming him. Before losing consciousness, he had staggered to the telephone.
    The doctor’s explanation was “mass psychology.”
    It is likely that readers of the Sun were puzzled, until they came to this explanation, and then—“Oh, of course! Mass psychology.”
    There is a continuity of all things that makes classifications fictions. But all human knowledge depends upon arrangements. Then all books—scientific, theological, philosophical—are only literary. In Scotland, in the month of September, 1903, there was an occurrence that can as reasonably be considered a case of “mass psychology,” as can be some of the foregoing instances: but now we are