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ladies had successfully brought her in spirit, into their mother's
drawing-room in Berkeley Square, the child graphically explaining all
she saw as she was mentally led along, and on being asked if she noticed
anything new and pretty on the mantel-piece, she got up and placed
herself in an attitude of dancing, and she said there was a figure and
it was clothed in lace. This was true; it was a bisque statuette of
Taglioni. On being led round the room, still in spirit and
clairvoyante, the child strangely described wax-flowers under a glass,
and laughed heartily at "Taffy riding his goat,"--a china ornament which
she could have known nothing of.

With respect to the lady who invited us, I can relate a strange story
wherewith the Brighton doctors in 1848 were familiar. Mrs. P. had an
invalid daughter subject to violent headaches, and as she had read of
the remedial powers of mesmerism from Chauncey Townsend's book,
privately resolved to try and cure her, and soon set her to sleep by the
usual "passes." However, when after twelve and even eighteen hours the
girl could not be awakened, Mrs. P. and her husband (a clergyman, who
knew nothing of the cause) were alarmed and summoned doctor after
doctor, to wake her, if they could. But all was in vain, until some one
turning to the peccant and magical volume found that by the simple
process of reversing the passes the abnormal slumber might be made to
cease. This was done at once, and all came more than right, for the girl
woke up without her usual headache, and was cured from that hour. At
this time of day, after thirty years and more, society having become
wiser, and bur medical men more physiologically hygienic, we all now wot
of mesmerism, and innumerable cases of cure through that mysterious form
of catalepsy.

For another small experience, I have several times been among a crowd of
others at public exhibitions of those who speak off-hand in prose or
verse, "inspirationally" as they call it, but as the outer world prefer
to believe, improvisatorially, and certainly amid such gifted persons
Mrs. Cora Tappan stands out prominently in my memory. At the Brighton
Pavilion I gave her for a theme to be versified on the spot extempore
my own heraldic motto, "L'espoir est ma force," and to my astonishment,
in a burst of rhymed eloquence she rolled off at least a dozen four-line
stanzas on Hope and its spiritual power. Some one else among the
audience gave the subject of cremation