ointing
an interview; but the local gentleman replied not. Yet still his
advertisement remains; and I see in every spiritualistic album dozens of
"property" relations in the shape of quasi-spirits, and wonder why the
local gentleman would not take me, so as to be immortalized in these
pages.

Equally modest was the advertising Sibyl. I wrote to the Sibyl, and
somebody replied, and "respectfully declined." But I was not to be done.
There is more than one Sibyl in the world. I called on No. 2 without
announcing my intention or sending in my name. This Sibyl at once
admitted me, and I mounted to the first floor front of a respectable
suburban lodging-house.

I waited anxiously for a long time, wondering whether Sibyl was
partaking of the onions, whose presence in that modest domicile was
odoriferously evidenced to my nose, though it was then scarcely
half-past one o'clock. Presently a portly middle-aged man, who might
have been Sibyl's youthful papa, or rather aged husband, entered, wiping
his mouth. He had clearly been partaking of the fragrant condiment.

Where was Sibyl?

"She would be with us directly," the gentleman said, varying the
proceedings by picking his teeth in the interim.

She _was_ with us in a minute, and never, I suppose, did picturesque
anticipations more suddenly collapse and come to grief than mine. I had
pictured Sibyl a bright ethereal being, and the realization of my ideal
weighed twelve stone, if an ounce. She was a big, fleshy, large-boned
woman of an utterly uncertain age, not without considerable good-nature
in her extensive features; but the pervading idea that you had when you
looked at Sibyl was that there was _too much of her_. I could not help
thinking of the husband who said he did not like a big wife: he
preferred two small ones; and then again I fell into wonderment as to
whether the man who was still engaged with his dental apparatus was
Sibyl's husband or papa.

I told them I was anxious to test Sibyl's powers; and, with a few passes
from his fat dumpy hands, the man soon put her to sleep. It looked to me
like an after-dinner nap, but I was told it was magnetic. It might have
been. By the way, I had unmistakable evidence from my olfactory organ
that Sibyl _had_ been eating onions.

I had provided myself with two locks of hair, as I had heard that
"psychometry" was among Sibyl's qualifications. I handed her the first,
and she immediately proceeded to describe a series of tablea