ng and careful examination convinced me that trickery on the part
of the child was a more improbable hypothesis than that the sounds
proceeded from some unknown agency. Nor could the sounds be accounted
for by trickery on the part of the servants in the house, for in
addition to my careful inquiries on this point, Mr. C. informed me that
he had obtained the raps on the handle of his umbrella out of doors,
when the child was by his side; and that the music-master complained of
raps proceeding from inside the piano whenever the child was listless or
inattentive at her music lesson. Mrs. C. told me that almost every night
she heard the raps by the bedside of the child when she went to bid her
good-night; and that after she had left the room and partially closed
the door, she would hear quite an animated conversation going on between
her daughter and her invisible companion, the child rapidly spelling
over the alphabet, and the raps occurring at the right letters, and the
child thus obtaining with surprising rapidity a clue to the words spelt
out.

"Still more violently improbable is the supposition that the parents of
the child were at the bottom of the mystery, stimulated by a desire to
impress their friends with the wonderful but imaginary gifts their child
possessed. The presence of the parents was not necessary for the
occurrence of the sounds, which, as I have said, often took place when I
was the only person in the room besides the child.

"Hallucination was the explanation which suggested itself to my own mind
when first I heard of the phenomena, but was dismissed as wholly
inapplicable after the first day's inquiry; nor do I think that any one
could maintain that different people, individually and collectively, for
some weeks, thought they heard and saw a series of sounds and motions
which had no objective existence.

"No! I was then, and am still, morally certain that the phenomena had a
real existence outside oneself, and that they were not produced by
trickery or by known causes. Hence I could come to no other conclusion
than that we had here a class of phenomena wholly new to science."[14]

After some three months the sounds ceased as unexpectedly as they had
commenced.

There is one form of sound manifestation to which no allusion has been
made--what is called the "Direct Voice." It is alleged to be of frequent
occurrence in spiritualistic circles. Articulate words are, it is
stated, spoken "direct," not