he
comment: 'Tell your mother this, and she will know that it is I, your
father, who am writing.' My mother had been unable to accept the
possibility up to now, but when I told her this she collapsed and
fainted. From that moment the letters became her greatest comfort, for
they were lovers during the forty years of their married life, and his
death almost broke her heart.

"As for myself, I am as convinced that my father, in his original
personality, still exists, as if he were still in his study with the
door shut. He is no more dead than he would be were he living in
America.

"I have compared the diction and vocabulary of these letters with those
employed in my own writing--I am not unknown as a magazine
contributor--and I find no points of similarity between the two."
There is much further evidence in this case for which I refer the
reader to the book itself.

THE CHERITON DUGOUT

I have mentioned in the text that I had some recent experience of a
case where a "polter-geist" or mischievous spirit had been manifesting.
These entities appear to be of an undeveloped order and nearer to earth
conditions than any others with which we are acquainted. This
comparative materialism upon their part places them low in the scale of
spirit, and undesirable perhaps as communicants, but it gives them a
special value as calling attention to crude obvious phenomena, and so
arresting the human attention and forcing upon our notice that there
are other forms of life within the universe. These borderland forces
have attracted passing attention at several times and places in the
past, such cases as the Wesley persecution at Epworth, the Drummer of
Tedworth, the Bells of Bealing, etc., startling the country for a
time--each of them being an impingement of unknown forces upon human
life. Then almost simultaneously came the Hydesville case in America
and the Cideville disturbances in France, which were so marked that
they could not be overlooked. From them sprang the whole modern
movement which, reasoning upwards from small things to great, from raw
things to developed ones, from phenomena to messages, is destined to
give religion the firmest basis upon which it has ever stood.
Therefore, humble and foolish as these manifestations may seem, they
have been the seed of large developments, and are worthy of our
respectful, though critical, attention.

Many such manifestations have appeared of recent years in various
quart