ld amuse himself of an evening asking it questions, being
careful to choose tolerably simple themes, such as, "Are you there?" (to
which the Spirit would sometimes answer "Yes!" and sometimes "No!") "Can
you hear me?" "Are you happy?"--and so on. The Spirit made the cabinet
crack--three times for "Yes" and twice for "No." Now and then it would
reply both "Yes!" and "No!" to the same question, which Whibley
attributed to over-scrupulousness. When nobody asked it anything it
would talk to itself, repeating "Yes!" "No!" "No!" "Yes!" over and
over again in an aimless, lonesome sort of a way that made you feel sorry
for it.

After a while Whibley bought a table, and encouraged it to launch out
into more active conversation. To please Whibley, I assisted at some of
the earlier seances, but during my presence it invariably maintained a
reticence bordering on positive dulness. I gathered from Whibley that it
disliked me, thinking that I was unsympathetic. The complaint was
unjust; I was not unsympathetic, at least not at the commencement. I
came to hear it talk, and I wanted to hear it talk; I would have listened
to it by the hour. What tired me was its slowness in starting, and its
foolishness when it had started, in using long words that it did not know
how to spell. I remember on one occasion, Whibley, Jobstock (Whibley's
partner), and myself, sitting for two hours, trying to understand what
the thing meant by "H-e-s-t-u-r-n-e-m-y-s-f-e-a-r." It used no stops
whatever. It never so much as hinted where one sentence ended and
another began. It never even told us when it came to a proper name. Its
idea of an evening's conversation was to plump down a hundred or so
vowels and consonants in front of you and leave you to make whatever
sense out of them you could.

We fancied at first it was talking about somebody named Hester (it had
spelt Hester with a "u" before we allowed a margin for spelling), and we
tried to work the sentence out on that basis, "Hester enemies fear," we
thought it might be. Whibley had a niece named Hester, and we decided
the warning had reference to her. But whether she was our enemy, and we
were to fear her, or whether we had to fear her enemies (and, if so, who
were they?), or whether it was our enemies who were to be frightened by
Hester, or her enemies, or enemies generally, still remained doubtful. We
asked the table if it meant the first suggestion, and it said "No." We
asked wh