an will can. I have gone to the dead so that I
might get from them some little token. Nothing ever came of
it--nothing, nothing. I have been in graveyards at dead of night,
having permission to enter from those in charge. I have sat alone on
a gravestone, that the spirits of those who slept underneath might
come to me. I have tried to obtain some sign. Not a thing! No, no,
the dead shall not return, nor shall any that go down into hell. So
says the Catholic Bible, and so say I. The spirits will not come
back. God has not ordered it.

"You want to know what are the points of my coming expose? First the
'rappings.'"

Mrs. Kane paused here, and I heard first a rapping under the floor
near my feet, then under the chair in which I was seated, and again
under a table on which I was leaning. She led me to the door and I
heard the same sound on the other side of it. Then, when she sat on
the piano stool, the legs of the instrument reverberated more loudly,
and the tap, tap, resounded throughout its hollow structure.

"It is all a trick?"

"Absolutely. Spirits, is he not easily fooled?"

Rap, rap, rap!

"I can always get an affirmative answer to that question," she
remarked.

Then I addressed certain suppositions to her. At last she said, "Yes,
you have hit it. It is, as you say, the manner in which the joints of
the foot can be used without lifting it from the floor. The power of
doing this can only be acquired by practice begun in early youth. One
must begin as early as twelve years. Thirteen is rather late. We
children, when we were playing together, years ago, discovered it,
and it was my eldest sister who first put the discovery to such an
infamous use.

"I call it infamous, for it was."

CHAPTER II.

THE DISCOMFITED ENEMY.

What has gone before is the whole story, in a sense.

The article in the _Herald_ either relates or suggests it. Indeed, no
refutation of it has been attempted. If there is one striking negative
feature in the circumstances surrounding this exposure of Spiritualism, it
is the entire absense of any reply from the great body of professional
spiritualists commensurate with the accusation made.

This confession of Mrs. Margaret Fox Kane was to them the handwriting on
the wall, the "_Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin_," of Spiritualism.

Lea