aresses on Sludge? And now and again in his course of fraud did he
not turn a wistful eye towards any reckless tatterdemalion, if only the
vagrant lived in freedom and in truth?

It's too bad, I say,
Ruining a soul so!

And in the midst of gulls who persistently refuse to be undeceived
cheating is so "cruel easy." The difficulty is rather that the cheating,
even when acknowledged, should ever be credited for what it is. The
medium has confessed! Yes, and to cheat may be part of the medium
nature; none the less he has the medium's gift of acting as a conductor
between the visible and the invisible worlds. Has he not told secrets of
the lives of his wondering clients which could not have been known by
natural means? And Sludge chuckles "could not?"--could not be known by
him who in his seeming passivity is alive at every nerve with the
instinct of the detective, by him whose trade was

Throwing thus
His sense out, like an ant-eater's long tongue,
Soft, innocent, warm, moist, impassible,
And when 'twas crusted o'er with creatures--slick,
Their juice enriched his palate. "Could not Sludge!"

Haunters of the seance of every species are his aiders and abettors--the
unbeliever, whom believers overwhelm or bribe to acquiescence, the fair
votaries who find prurient suggestions characteristic of the genuine
medium, the lover of the lie through the natural love of it, the
amateur, incapable of a real conviction, who plays safely with
superstition, the literary man who welcomes a new flavour for the
narrative or the novel, the philosophic diner-out, who wants the
chopping-block of a disputable doctrine on which to try the edge of his
faculty. Is it his part, Sludge asks indignantly, to be grateful to the
patrons who have corrupted and debased him?

Gratitude to these?
The gratitude, forsooth, of a prostitute
To the greenhorn and the bully.

The truculence of Sludge is not without warrant; it is indeed no other
than the truculence of Robert Browning, "shaking his mane," as Dante
Rossetti described him in his outbreaks against the spiritualists,
"with occasional foamings at the mouth."[56]

Where then is the little grain of truth which has vitality amid the
putrefaction of Sludge's nature? Liar and cheat as he is, he cannot be
sure "but there was something in it, tricks and all." The spiritual
world, he feels, is as real as the material world; the supernatural
interpenetrates the