If they are not, let somebody, in the name of
nineteenth-century science, send them off as with the crow of
chanticleer, and let us hear no more of Spirit Faces or Spirit Forms.

CHAPTER XLIV.

SITTING WITH A SIBYL.

The connexion of modesty with merit is proverbial, though questioned by
Sydney Smith, who says their only point in common is the fact that each
begins with an--m. Modesty, however--waiving the question of
accompanying merit--is a trait which, in my mystic inquiries and devious
wanderings, I meet with far more frequently than might be expected. I
have just met with two instances which I hasten to put on record, if
only to confute those who say that the age in general, and spirit
mediums in particular, are not prone to be modest and retiring. My first
modest person was a Spirit Photographer; my second was a Sibyl. I might
have looked for bashfulness in the latter, but was certainly surprised
to meet with it in the former. I suddenly learnt from the Medium the
fact that a Spirit Photographer had settled down in my immediate
neighbourhood, and the appearance of his ghostly advertisement brings to
my recollection some previous mystic experiences I myself had in this
way.

A now celebrated medium, Mrs. Guppy, nee Miss Nicholl, was, in the days
of her maidenhood, a practitioner of photography in Westbourne Grove;
and, as far as I know, she might have been the means of opening up to
the denizens of the Summer Land this new method of terrestrial
operations. Ever on the qui vive for anything new in the occult line, I
at once interviewed Miss Nicholl and sat for my portrait, expecting at
the least to find the attendant spirit of my departed grandmamma or
defunct maiden aunt standing sentinel over me, as I saw departed
relations doing in many cartes de visite in the room. I confess there
was a kind of made-up theatrical-property look about the attendant
spirits which gave one the idea that the superior intelligences must
have dressed in a hurry when they sat or stood for their portraits. They
looked, in fact, if it be not irreverent to say it, rather like so many
bundles of pneumatical rags than respectable domestic ghosts. However,
as long as I got the ghosts I did not care about the dress. Tenue de
soir point de rigueur, I would have said, as they do outside the cheap
casinos in Paris, or "Evening dress not required," if one must descend
to the vernacular. Well, I sat persistently and patiently through I