I confess to a kind of chill that crept down my backbone at these words, and to having turned my head and stared hard at the book-cases behind me.

“But they—­I mean something—­rapped one night before you came,” I suggested.

“Yes, and they might rap after I was gone.  The simple noises are not uncommon in places where there are no better means of communication.  The extreme methods of expression, such as you have witnessed this winter, are, I doubt not, practicable only when the system of a medium is accessible.  They write all sorts of messages for you.  You would ridicule them.  I do not repeat them.  You and Cousin Alison do not see, hear, feel as I do.  We are differently made.  There are lying spirits and true, good spirits and bad.  Sometimes the bad deceive and distress me, but sometimes—­sometimes my mother comes.”

She lowered her voice reverently, and I was fain to hush the laugh upon my lips.  Whatever the thing might prove to be to me, it was daily comfort to the nervous, unstrung, lonely woman, whom to suspect of trickery I began to think was worse than stupidity.

From the time of my midnight experience in the library I allowed myself to look a little further into the subject of “communications.”  Miss Fellows wrote them out at my request whenever they “came” to her.  Writers on Spiritualism have described the process so frequently, that it is unnecessary for me to dwell upon it at length.  The influences took her unawares in the usual manner.  In the usual manner her arm—­to all appearance the passive instrument of some unseen, powerful agency—­jerked and glided over the paper, writing in curious, scrawly characters, never in her own neat little old-fashioned hand, messages of which, on coming out from the “trance” state, she would have-no memory; of many of which at any time she could have had no comprehension.  These messages assumed every variety of character from the tragic to the ridiculous, and a large portion of them had no point whatever.

One day Benjamin West desired to give me lessons in oil-painting.  The next, my brother Joseph, dead now for ten years, asked forgiveness for his share in a little quarrel of ours which had embittered a portion of his last days,—­of which, by the way, I am confident that Miss Fellows knew nothing.  At one time I received a long discourse enlightening me on the arrangement of the “spheres” in the disembodied state of existence.  At another, Alison’s dead grandfather pathetically reminded her of a certain Sunday afternoon at “meetin’” long ago, when the child Allis hooked his wig off in the long prayer with a bent pin and a piece of fish-line.

One day we were saddened by the confused wail of a lost spirit, who represented his agonies as greater than soul could bear, and clamored for relief.  Moved to pity, I inquired:—­

“What can we do for you?”

Unseen knuckles rapped back the touching answer:—­