staken, and she
rejoined, "Then he ought _not_ to be." At that time Mr. and Mrs.
Ruskin were, so far as I knew, living together, and no rumor of their
incompatibility had come about.

Mrs. Brown explained the possession of her occult powers by a voice in
the manner of Socrates's demon, which, she said, was always present
with her, and which she recognized as entirely foreign to her. She
repeated what she heard, word for word as the words came, hesitating
and sometimes leaving a sentence incomplete, not hearing the sequence.
When she asked who was speaking to her, she received only the reply,
"We are spirit," and no indication of personality was ever offered. On
one occasion, when Mr. and Mrs. Brown were on a fishing trip into the
wild parts of New York State, and, returning, were on their way to the
railway station, the wheel of their wagon broke and they had to go to
a blacksmith on the road to have it repaired. She said to her husband
that they would lose the train, to which the voice replied that they
would be in time, for the train was late and they would arrive with a
minute to spare. And in fact as they drew up at the station the train
came in sight and they had a minute to spare. There were many
such instances in which Mrs. Brown showed to the circle of her
acquaintances, which was large and included many of the most
intellectual minds of the artistic and literary world whose centre was
New York, the possession of powers "not dreamed of in our philosophy,"
but, as she carefully avoided notoriety, they never came under public
notice. Her husband implicitly and always followed the directions
given her through her demon.

In one of the social gatherings which grew out of the study of
spiritism was a lady who, like myself, was a convinced believer in the
reality of the phenomena, but skeptical as to the value and personal
origin of the communications made in the "circles." Her daughter,
a child of seven, was in fact a hypnotic clairvoyant of singular
lucidity, and my brother, Dr. Jacob Stillman, obtained from the mother
permission to have a private seance, only the mother and child, the
doctor, and myself being present. I hypnotized the girl Fanny, and
when she opened her eyes in the hypnotic state the doctor made the
usual tests for coma, exposing the eyes to the sudden glare of a
brilliant light, sticking pins into her flesh, and so forth, and
pronounced the coma absolute when, as he stuck a pin in her arm, she