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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
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