only visible occupant;
then sat down again. The rappings had meantime become loud and
impatient.

I had learned that very week from Miss Fellows the spiritual alphabet
with which she was in the habit of "communicating with her dead mother."
I had never asked her, nor had she proposed, to use it herself for my
benefit. I had meant to try all other means of investigation before
resorting to it. Now, however being alone, and being perplexed and
annoyed by my sense of having invisible company, I turned and spelled
out upon the table, so many raps to a letter till the question was
complete:--

"_What do you want of me?_"

Instantly the answer came rapping back:--

"_Stretch down your hand._"

I put my fingers under the table, and I felt, as indubitably as I ever
felt a touch in my life, the grasp of a _warm, human hand_.

I added to the broken paragraph in the letter to my friend a brief
account of the occurrence, and reiterated my entreaties that he would
come at his earliest convenience to my house. He was an Episcopal
clergyman, by the way, and I considered that his testimony would uphold
my fast-sinking character for veracity among my townspeople. I began to
have an impression that this dilemma in which I found myself was a
pretty serious one for a man of peaceable disposition and honest
intentions to be in.

About this time I undertook to come to a little better understanding
with Miss Fellows. I took her away alone, and having tried my best not
to frighten the life out of her by my grave face, asked her seriously
and kindly to tell me whether she supposed herself to have any
connection with the phenomena in my house. To my surprise she answered
promptly that she thought she had. I repressed a whistle, and "asked for
information."

"The presence of a medium renders easy what would otherwise be
impossible," she replied. "I offered to go away, Mr. Hotchkiss, in the
beginning."

I assured her that I had no desire to have her go away at present, and
begged her to proceed.

"The Influences in the house are strong, as I have said before," she
continued, looking through me and beyond me with her vacant eyes.
"Something is wrong. They are never at rest. I hear them. I feel them. I
see them. They go up and down the stairs with me. I find them in my
room. I see them gliding about. I see them standing now, with their
hands almost upon your shoulders."

I confess to a kind of chill that crept down my backbone at the