can he recollect ever having committed a murder? He racks his brains in
vain, not a single murder comes to his recollection. He never forged a
will. Doesn't even know where anything is hid. Of what use will he be
in ghostland? One pictures him passing the centuries among a moody crowd
of uninteresting mediocrities, brooding perpetually over their wasted
lives. Only the ghosts of ladies and gentlemen mixed up in crime have
any "show" in ghostland.

The Spirit does not shine as a Conversationalist.

I feel an equal dissatisfaction with the spirits who are supposed to
return to us and communicate with us through the medium of three-legged
tables. I do not deny the possibility that spirits exist. I am even
willing to allow them their three-legged tables. It must be confessed it
is a clumsy method. One cannot help regretting that during all the ages
they have not evolved a more dignified system. One feels that the three-
legged table must hamper them. One can imagine an impatient spirit
getting tired of spelling out a lengthy story on a three-legged table.
But, as I have said, I am willing to assume that, for some spiritual
reason unfathomable to my mere human intelligence, that three-legged
table is essential. I am willing also to accept the human medium. She
is generally an unprepossessing lady running somewhat to bulk. If a
gentleman, he so often has dirty finger-nails, and smells of stale beer.
I think myself it would be so much simpler if the spirit would talk to me
direct; we could get on quicker. But there is that about the medium, I
am told, which appeals to a spirit. Well, it is his affair, not mine,
and I waive the argument. My real stumbling-block is the spirit
himself--the sort of conversation that, when he does talk, he indulges
in. I cannot help feeling that his conversation is not worth the
paraphernalia. I can talk better than that myself.

The late Professor Huxley, who took some trouble over this matter,
attended some half-dozen _seances_, and then determined to attend no
more.

"I have," he said, "for my sins to submit occasionally to the society of
live bores. I refuse to go out of my way to spend an evening in the dark
with dead bores."

The spiritualists themselves admit that their table-rapping spooks are
precious dull dogs; it would be difficult, in face of the communications
recorded, for them to deny it. They explain to us that they have not yet
achieved communicat