ffin. Sometimes the baby spilled the milk
out of the mug upon the dictionary. But for my personal uses, the
Andover grandfather's memoirs began and ended with the mug and the
coffin.

The other grandfather was not distinguished as a scholar; he was but
an orthodox minister of ability and originality, and with a vivacious
personal history. Of him I knew something. From his own lips came
thrilling stories of his connection with the underground railway of
slavery days; how he sent the sharpest carving-knife in the house,
concealed in a basket of food, to a hidden fugitive slave who had
vowed never to be taken alive, and whose master had come North in
search of him. It was a fine thing, that throbbing humanity, which
could in those days burst the reformer out of the evangelical husk,
and I learned my lesson from it. ("Where _did_ she get it?"
conservative friends used to wail, whenever I was seen to have tumbled
into the last new and unfashionable reform.)

From his own lips, too, I heard the accounts of that extraordinary
case of house-possession of which (like Wesley) this innocent and
unimaginative country minister, who had no more faith in "spooks" than
he had in Universalists, was made the astonished victim.

Night upon night I have crept gasping to bed, and shivered for hours
with my head under the clothes, after an evening spent in listening to
this authentic and fantastic family tale. How the candlesticks walked
out into the air from the mantelpiece, and back again; how the chairs
of skeptical visitors collected from all parts of the country to study
what one had hardly then begun to call the "phenomena" at the
parsonage at Stratford, Connecticut, hopped after the guests when they
crossed the room; how the dishes at the table leaped, and the silver
forks were bent by unseen hands, and cold turnips dropped from the
solid ceiling; and ghastly images were found, composed of
underclothing proved to have been locked at the time in drawers of
which the only key lay all the while in Dr. Phelps's pocket; and how
the mysterious agencies, purporting by alphabetical raps upon bed-head
or on table to be in torments of the nether world, being asked what
their host could do to relieve them, demanded a piece of squash pie.

From the old man's own calm hands, within a year or two of his death,
I received the legacy of the written journal of these phenomena, as
recorded by the victim from day to day, during the seven months that