ificance attaches to the following bit of evidence contributed by
Lord Crawford with regard to the London levitation:

"I saw the levitations in Victoria Street when Home floated out of the
window. He first went into a trance and walked about uneasily; he then
went into the hall. While he was away I heard a voice whisper in my ear
'He will go out of one window and in at another.' I was alarmed and
shocked at the idea of so dangerous an experiment. I told the company
what I had heard and we then waited for Home's return."

After it is stated that Lord Crawford, not long before, had fancied he
beheld an apparition of a man seated in a chair, it is easy to imagine
the attitude of credulous expectancy with which he, at all events, would
"wait for Home's return" via the open window. And the others were
doubtless in the same expectant frame of mind. "Expectancy" and
"suggestibility" will, indeed, work marvels. I shall never forget how
the truth of this was borne home to me some years ago. A friend of
mine--now a physician in Maryland, but at that time a medical student in
Toronto--occasionally amused himself by giving table-tipping seances, in
which he enacted the role of medium. There was no suspicion on his
sitters' part that he was a "fraud." One evening he invoked the "spirit"
of a little child, who had been dead a couple of years, and proceeded
to "spell out" some highly edifying messages. Suddenly the seance was
interrupted by a shriek and a lady present, not a relative of the dead
child, fell to the floor in a faint. When revived, she declared that
while the messages were being delivered she had seen the head of a child
appear through the top of the table.

With such an instance before us, it can hardly be deemed surprising that
Home should be able to play on the imagination of sitters so sympathetic
and receptive as Lords Dunraven and Crawford unquestionably were. To
tell the truth, Home's whole career, with its scintillating,
melodramatic, and uniformly successful phases is altogether inexplicable
unless it be assumed that he possessed the hypnotist's qualities in a
superlative degree.

It may well be, however, that in the last analysis he not only deceived
others but also deceived himself--that his charlatanry was the work of a
man constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between reality and
fiction in so far as related to the performance of feats contributing to
the success of his "mission." In other words,