A morning or two after Alison chanced to leave half a dozen teaspoons upon the sideboard in the breakfast-room; they were of solid silver, and quite thick.  She was going to rub them herself, I believe, and went into the china-closet, which opens from the room, for the silver-soap.  The breakfast-room was left vacant, and it was vacant when she returned to it, and she insists, with a quiet conviction which it is hardly reasonable to doubt, that no human being did or could have entered the room without her knowledge.  When she came back to the sideboard every one of those spoons lay there bent double.  She showed them to me when I came home at noon.  Had they been pewter toys they could not have been more completely twisted out of shape than they were.  I took them without any remarks (I began to feel as if this mystery were assuming uncomfortable proportions), put them away, just as I found them, into a small cupboard in the wall of the breakfast-room, locked the cupboard door with the only key in the house which fitted it, put the key in my inner vest pocket, and meditatively ate my dinner.

About half an hour afterward a neighbor dropped in to groan over the weather and see the baby, and Allis chanced to mention the incident of the spoons.

“Really, Mrs. Hotchkiss!” said the lady, with a slight smile, and that indefinite, quickly smothered change of eye which signifies, “I don’t believe a word of it!” “Are you sure that there is not a mistake somewhere, or a little mental hallucination?  The story is very entertaining, but—­I beg your pardon—­I should be interested to see those spoons.”

“Your curiosity shall be gratified, madam,” I said, a little testily; and taking the key from my pocket, I led her to the cupboard and unlocked the door.  I found those spoons as straight, smooth, and fair as ever spoons had been;—­not a dent, not a wrinkle, not a bend nor untrue line could we discover anywhere upon them.

“Oh!” said our visitor, significantly.

That lady, be it recorded, then and thenceforward spared no pains to found and strengthen throughout Nemo’s Avenue the theory that “the Hotchkisses were getting up all that spiritual nonsense to force their landlord into lower rents.  And such respectable people too!  It did seem a pity, didn’t it?”

One night I was alone in the library.  It was late; about half-past eleven, I think.  The brightest gas jet was lighted, so that I could see to every portion of the small room.  The door was shut.  There was no furniture but the book-cases, my table, and chair; no sliding:  doors or concealed corners; no nook or cranny in which any human creature could lurk unseen by me; and I say that I was alone.

I had been writing to a confidential friend a somewhat minute account of the disturbances in my house, which were now of about six weeks’ duration.  I had begged him to come and observe them for himself, and help me out with a solution,—­I myself was at a loss for a reasonable one.  There certainly seemed to be evidence of superhuman agency; but I was hardly ready yet to commit myself thoroughly to that view of the matter, and—­