“I tell you I never spoke more solemnly.  I cannot, in the face of facts, ascribe all these phenomena to human agency.  Something that comes we know not whence, and goes we know not whither, is at work there in the dark.  I am driven to grant to it an extra-human power.  Yet when that flabby Miss Fellows, in the trance state, undertakes to bring me messages from my dead wife, and when she attempts to recall the most tender memories of our life together, I cannot,”—­he paused and turned his face a little away,—­“it would be pleasant to think I had a word from Mary, but I cannot think she is there.  I don’t believe good spirits concern themselves with this thing.  It has in its fair developments too much nonsense and too much positive sin; read a few numbers of the ‘Banner,’ or attend a convention or two, if you want to be convinced of that.  If they ’re not good spirits they’re bad ones, that’s all.  I’ve dipped into the subject in various ways since I have been here; consulted the mediums, talked with the prophets; I’m convinced that there is no dependence to be placed on the thing.  You never learn anything from it that it is worth while to learn; above all, you never can trust its prophecies.  It is evil,—­evil at the root; and except by physicians and scientific men it had better be let alone.  They may yet throw light on it; you and I cannot.  I propose for myself to drop it henceforth.  In fact, it looks too much toward putting one’s self on terms of intimacy with the Prince of the Powers of the Air to please me.”

“You’re rather positive, considering the difficulty of the subject,” I said.

The truth is, and it may be about time to own to it, that the three months’ siege against the mystery, which I had held so pertinaciously that winter, had driven me to broad terms of capitulation.  I assented to most of my friend’s conclusions, but where he stopped I began a race for further light.  I understood then, for the first time, the peculiar charm which I had often seen work so fatally with dabblers in Spiritualism.  The fascination of the thing was upon me.  I ransacked the papers for advertisements of mediums.  I went from city to city at their mysterious calls.  I held seances in my parlor, and frightened my wife with messages—­some of them ghastly enough—­from her dead relatives, I ran the usual gauntlet of strange seers in strange places, who told me my name, the names of all my friends, dead or alive, my secret aspirations and peculiar characteristics, my past history and future prospects.

For a long time they never made a failure.  Absolute strangers told me facts about myself which not even my own wife knew:  whether they spoke with the tongues of devils, or whether, by some unknown laws of magnetism, they simply read my thoughts, I am not even now prepared to say.  I think if they had made a miss I should have been spared some suffering.  Their communications had sometimes a ridiculous aimlessness, and occasionally a subtle deviltry coated about with religion, like a pill with sugar, but often a significant and fearful accuracy.