njured man who had been murdered for his money. To
the question how old he was, there came thirty-one distinct raps. He
also gave them to understand that he was a married man, and had left a
wife and five children; that his wife was dead, and had been dead two
years. After ascertaining so much, she asked the question "Will the
noise continue if I call in some neighbours?" The answer was by rapping
in the affirmative.

At first they called in their nearest neighbours, who came thinking they
would have a hearty laugh at the family for being frightened--but when
the first neighbour came in and found that the noise, whatever it might
be, could tell the age of herself as well as others, and give correct
answers to questions on matters of which the family of Mr. Fox was quite
ignorant, she concluded that there was something beside a subject of
ridicule and laughter in these unseen but audible communications. These
neighbours insisted on calling others who came, and after investigation
were as much confounded as at first.

The reader must endeavour to picture to himself the scene which followed
the introduction of the neighbours to this weird and most novel court
of inquiry. Imagine the place to be an humble cottage in a remote and
obscure hamlet; the judge and jurors, simple unsophisticated rustics;
and the witness an invisible, unknown being, a denizen of a world of
whose very existence mankind has been ignorant; acting by laws
mysterious and inconceivable, in modes utterly beyond all human control
or comprehension, and breaking through what has been deemed the dark and
eternal seal of death, to reveal the long-hidden mysteries of the grave,
and drag to the light secrets which not even the fabled silence of the
grave could longer hide away. Those who have been accustomed to dream of
death as the end of all whom its shadowy portals inclose, alone are
prepared to appreciate the awful and startling reality of this strange
scene, breaking apart, as it did, like a rope of sand, all the
preconceived opinions of countless ages on the existence and destiny of
the living dead.

Those who have become familiar with the revealments of the spirit circle
will only smile at the consternation evoked in this rustic party by the
now familiar presence and manifestations of "the spirits," but to those
who still stand in the night of superstition, deeming of all earth's
countless millions as "dead," "lost," "gone," no one knows whither;
never