nce that early period
of his existence, exhibited any "mediumistic power."

The character of the communications purporting to come from the
"spirit-land" has always been such as to condemn them, even if nothing
else would, in the mind of any one gifted with a clear judgment. How many
have read with a bitter sneer those pretended words from "the great ones
of the earth," which would place them, if they had really written or
uttered them in the unseen life, on a mere level with the emptiest-headed
mortals whom we know in this!

"Alas!" exclaims Nathaniel Hawthorne in "The Blythedale Romance,"
"methinks we have fallen on an evil age! If these phenomena have not
humbug at the bottom, so much the worse for us. What can they indicate in
a spiritual way, except that the soul of man is descending to a lower
point that it has ever reached while incarnate? We are pursuing a downward
course in the eternal march, and thus bring ourselves into the same range
with beings whom death--in requital of their gross and evil lives--has
degraded below humanity. To hold intercourse with spirits of this order,
we must stoop and grovel in some elements more vile than earthly dust.
These goblins, if they exist at all, are but the shadows of past
mortality--mere refuse stuff, adjudged unworthy of the eternal world, and
as the most favorable supposition, dwindling gradually into nothingness.
The less we have to say to them, the better, lest we share their fate."

CHAPTER XII.

A SCIENTIFIC JURY.

At one period of her strange career, Mrs. Kane entered the service of Mr.
Henry Seybert, the famous and wealthy spiritualist of Philadelphia, who
proposed to found what he called a "Spiritual Mansion."

Mrs. Kane's salary and appointments were liberal, and her situation was
one which would have met the fondest wishes of many noted and ambitious
"mediums." She was the high priestess of this new temple of the unseen
entities, and as such she was honored and treated with most exalted
respect.

The conditions of the "Spiritual Mansion" were in all respects favorable
to the intercourse of dwellers in the flesh with those who inhabit the
realm of shadows, if such there had been.

The taking up of her abode in this singular institution was one of her
earliest steps, after the throwing off of her deep weeds of mourning, worn
in memory of the untimely termination of her dream of happiness. It was
then that she found that the professional life of a