trine fall on inattentive ears. "There
is a shocking recrudescence of superstition and devil-worship," said a
clergyman to me the other day; "people consult fraudulent mediums and
fortune-tellers."

I listened to him and remembered an afternoon's visit to a bereaved
mother. She is a charwoman endowed with the scientific mind. Her son had
been killed by an exploding shell. Only a fragment or two had been
necessary for the task. Jimmy had no chance. Courage and energy had
never failed him. The spirit that dwelt within his thin and somewhat
stunted body would have rejoiced in battle with a lion. But shells are
no respecters of spirit. Jimmy had successfully fought poverty and
ill-health; he had risen from a newspaper-boy's existence to the dizzy
heights of a milkman's cart. His pale face with its prominent eyes and
rich, chestnut forelock bore an expression of indomitable Cockney
confidence in the ultimate decency of things. He had always been kind to
his mother. "More like a girl than a boy," she said, "in the way he
cared for his home and looked after me." And now Jimmy was dead: the
message had come that he would not return. "And why is he dead," said
the mother to me, "and where is he?" She was sitting in her kitchen,
which bore its usual aspect of order and cleanliness. But her face
looked as if some disordering power had passed over her. "I asked our
curate to explain where Jimmy is," she continued, "and he told me that
doubt is a sin, and that we shall meet again on the day of resurrection.
And when I told him that I felt Jimmy quite close to me in this kitchen,
a week after his death, and that I thought I heard his voice calling me,
the curate said I ought not to think of such things. Faith and hard work
were the best cure for such fancies, he said."

"But do you know what I did?" she added in a whisper, intended to
deceive the curate, "I went to one of those mediums that Mrs. Jones
knows about. I paid a shilling, and we all sat in a ring, and the medium
saw Jimmy and described him, just as he is in his uniform and cap, a
little over the right ear, and the scar across his nose--you know, the
scar from the fall down the front steps when he was nine--and all
smiling, and showing the missing tooth. 'Jimmy wants you to know that he
is happy, very happy,' she said, and then Jimmy came and spoke through
the medium. 'Mother,' he said to me, 'I want you to give my pipe with
the silver band to Charlie, and don't make no bo