f brain tissue, as
may be proved by the accepted phenomena of hypnotism, where the soul is
commanded to leave the body and see and hear and feel and know things
which the mere physical organs can not experience, owing to the
interposition of space. The "father" said that at death the Divine Will
commands the ripened seed of life to leave the body and assume
immortality, just as that Will commands the seeds of plants and the
sperm of animals to assume their natural functions. The Thing that
talked through David's lips said that the body is the seed-pod of the
soul, and that souls grow little or much as they are planted and
environed and nurtured by life. All this it said in many nights, while
Larmy wondered and the reporter scoffed and stuck pins in David to see
if he could feel them. And the boy wakened from his dreams always to
say: "Gimme a cigarette!" and to reach over and pull the lever of his
music-box, and add: "Perfessor, give us a tune! Hen, the professor says
he won't play unless you give me a cigarette for him."

One night, after a long wrangle which ended in a discourse by the
"father," a strange thing happened. Larmy and It were contending as to
whether It was merely a hypnotic influence on the boy, of someone living
whom they did not know, or what It claimed to be, a disembodied spirit.
By way of diversion, the reporter had just run a binder's needle under
one of the boy's finger-nails to see whether he would flinch. Then the
Voice that was coming from David's mouth spoke and said: "I will show
you something to prove it;" and the entranced boy rose and went to the
back room, while the two others followed him.

He turned the lever that flashed the light on his linotype, and set the
little motor going. He lifted up the lid of the metal-pot, to see if the
fire was keeping it molten. Then the boy sat at the machine with his
hands folded in his lap, gazing at the empty copy-holder out of dead
eyes. In a minute--perhaps it was a little longer--a brass matrix
slipped from the magazine and clicked down into the assembler; in a
second or two another fell, and then, very slowly, like the ticks of a
great clock, the brasses slipped--slipped--slipped into their places,
and the steel spaces dropped into theirs. A line was formed, while the
boy's hands lay in his lap. When it was a full line he grabbed the
lever, that sent the line over to the metal-pot to be cast, and his hand
fell back in his lap, while the dripping o