think much of Bott; he has too many knuckles on his hands. I never saw
a man with so many knuckles. I wouldn't mention Mr. Farnham to him to
save his life, but I might get something out of him without telling him
anything. He is certainly a very smart man, and whether it's spirits or
not, he knows lots of things."

It was in this mood that she entered the little apartment where Bott
held what he called his "Intermundane Seances." The room was small and
stuffy. A simulacrum of a chest of drawers in one corner was really
Bott's bed, where the seer reposed at night, and which, tilted up
against the wall during the day, contained the rank bedclothes, long
innocent of the wash-tub. There were a dozen or so of cane-bottom
chairs, a little table for a lamp, but no other furniture. At one side
of the room was a small closet without a door, but with a dark and
dirty curtain hung before its aperture. Around it was a wooden railing,
breast high.

A boy with a high forehead, and hair combed behind ears large and
flaring like those of a rabbit, sat by the door, and took the tickets
of invited guests and the half-dollars of the casuals. The seer
received everybody with a nerveless shake of a clammy hand, showed them
to seats, and exchanged a word or two about the weather, and the
"conditions," favorable or otherwise, to spiritual activity. When he
saw Maud and Sam his tallowy face flushed, in spots, with delight. He
took them to the best places the room afforded, and stammered his
pleasure that they had come.

"Oh! the pleasure is all ours," said Maud, who was always
self-possessed when she saw men stammering. "It's a great privilege to
get so near to the truth as you bring us, Mr. Bott."

The prophet had no answer ready; he merely flushed again in spots, and
some new arrivals called him away.

The room was now pretty well filled with the unmistakable crowd which
always attend such meetings. They were mostly artisans, of more
intellectual ambition than their fellows, whose love of the marvellous
was not held in control by any educated judgment. They had long,
serious faces, and every man of them wore long hair and a soft hat.
Their women were generally sad, broken-spirited drudges, to whom this
kind of show was like an opera or a ball. There were two or three
shame-faced believers of the better class, who scoffed a little but
trembled in secret, and a few avowed skeptics, young clerks on a mild
spree, ready for fun if any shoul