tching it, he took courage--seemed to feel that he could trust me.
Slapping his knee, he let himself go in a rush of that deep, chuckling,
gurgling, child-like negro laughter which is one of the most appealing
gifts of his pathetic race.

"Mebbe, sar; mebbe. Spirits is curious things; dey need inspiration
sometimes, just like ourselves."

"What kind of inspiration, do you think, gets the best results, Your
Majesty?"

"Well, sar, I can't say as dey is very particular, but I'se noticed dey
do seem powerful 'tached to just plain good old Jamaica rum."

"They shall have it," I said.

I had noticed that there was a saloon a few yards away, so before many
more minutes had passed, I had been there and come back again, and the
decanter stood ruddily filled, ready for the resumption of our _seance._
But before we began, I of course accepted the seer's invitation to join
him and the spirits in a friendly libation.

Then--I having closed my eyes--we began again, and it was astonishing
with what rapidity the thick-coming pictures began to crowd upon that
inner vision with which the Lord had endowed his faithful follower!

Of course, I was inclined now to take the whole thing as an amusing
imposture; but presently, watching his face and the curious "seeing"
expression of his eyes, and noting the exactitude of one or two of his
pictures, I began to feel that, however much he might be inventing or
elaborating, there was some substratum of truth in what he was telling
me. I had had sufficient experience of mediums and clairvoyants to know
that, except in cases of absolute fraud, there was usually--beneath a
certain amount of conscious "imaginativeness"--a mysterious gift at
work, independent of their volition; something they did see, for which
they themselves could not account, and over which they had no control.
And as he proceeded I became more and more convinced that this was the
case also with Old King Coffee.

The first pictures that came to him were merely pictures, though
astonishingly clear ones, of Webster's boat, the _Flamingo,_ of Webster
himself, and of the men and the old dog Sailor; but in all this he might
have been visualising from actual knowledge. Yet the details were
curiously exact. We were all bathed in moonlight, he said--very bright
moonlight, moonlight you could read by. Pictures of us out at sea,
passing coral islands and so forth followed, all general in character.
But presently, his gaze becoming mor