ages, unaccountable communications; but nothing
is ever told, in any seance, which does not lie perdu in the breast of
someone of the company. There is often no willing deception;
peradventure, no fooling at all: but as you cannot draw water from a dry
well, neither can you get a message except the germ of it broods within
some soul with which you have some present contact.

And then, things being so, what advance can we make?

Many people seem to be unaware that to search after necromancers and
soothsayers is forbidden by the English law. Consequently--let us say--a
great number of cultivated ladies and gentlemen do, even in this
intelligent age, resort to the homes of such folk; aye, and consult
them, too, eagerly, at the most critical junctures in their lives.

I know of a London washerwoman by trade who makes vastly more money by
falling into trances than by her legitimate calling, to which she adds
the letting of lodgings.

On one occasion she was commissioned to comment, in her swoon, on the
truth or constancy of a girl's lover; an unopened letter from him being
placed in her hands as she slept. She did comment on him, and truly. She
said he was not true: that he did not love the girl really, that it was
all a sham. Well, the power by which that clairvoyante spoke was the
lurking distrust within the mind of the girl who stood by with an aching
heart, listening to her doom. Also, perhaps, some virtue we know not of
transfused itself subtilely from the paper upon which that perfidious
one had breathed and written. Who can tell? But in any case the thing is
all a snare and a delusion, and after much observation I can honestly
say--I repeat this--that he or she who dabbles in these mysteries loses
faith in God, and is apt to become a prey to the power of Evil.

And then the delusions, collusions, and hopeless entanglement of deceit
mixed up with Spiritualism! How many tales I could tell--an I would!

There was a certain rich old gentleman in a great centre of trade and
finance. The mediums had hope and every prospect he would make a will,
or had made one, in their favour--endowing them and theirs with splendid
and perpetual grants. This credulous searcher had advanced to the stage
when doubt was terrible. He was ardent to convert others, and thereby
strengthen his own fortress. He prevailed upon two clear-headed business
men, brothers, to attend his seances. With reluctance, to do him a
favour, they, after much d