the light’.  The hands and feet of the young people were watched, but nothing was detected, while the raps were going on everywhere around, on the chairs, on the quilt, and on the big four-post wooden bedsteads where they were lying.  Mr. Barrett now played Moro with the raps, that is, he extended so many fingers, keeping his hand in the pocket of a loose great-coat, and the sounds always responded the right number.  Four trials were made.  Then came a noise like the beating of a drum, ’with violent scratching and tearing sounds’.

The trouble began three weeks after the wife’s death.  Once a number of small stones were found on Maggie’s bed.  All the family suffered from sleeplessness, and their candles, even when concealed, were constantly stolen.  ‘It took a boot from a locked drawer,’ and the boot was found in a great chest of feathers in a loft.  A Bible was spirited about, and a Methodist teacher (the family were Methodists) made no impression on the agency.  They tried to get some communication by an alphabet, but, said the farmer, ’it tells lies as often as truth, and oftener, I think’.

Mr. Barrett, and a friend, on two occasions, could detect no method of imposture, and, as the farmer did not believe that his children, sorely distressed by the loss of their mother, would play such tricks, at such a time, even if they could, the mystery remains unsolved.  The family found that the less attention they paid to the disturbances, the less they were vexed.  Mr. Barrett, examining some other cases, found that Dr. Carpenter’s and other theories did not account for them.  But it is certain that the children, as Methodists, had read Wesley’s account of the spirit at Epworth, in 1716.  Mr. Barrett was aware of this circumstance, but was unable to discover how the thing was managed, on the hypothesis of fraudulent imitation.  The Irish household seems to have reaped no profit by the affair, but rather trouble, annoyance, and the expense of hospitality to strange visitors.

The agency was mendacious, as usual, for Porphyry complains that the ‘spirits’ were always as deceitful as the Cock Lane ghost, feigning to be gods, heroes, or the souls of the dead.  It is very interesting to note how, in Greece, as Christianity waxed, and paganism waned, such inquiring minds as that of Porphyry fell back on seances and spiritualism, or superstitions unmentioned by Homer, and almost unheard of in the later classical literature.  Religion, which began in Shamanism, in the trances of Angakut and Birraark, returned to these again, and everywhere found marvel, mystery, imposture, conscious, or unconscious.  The phenomena have never ceased, imposture has always been detected or asserted, but that hypothesis rarely covers the whole field, and so, if we walk in Cock Lane at all, we wander darkling, in good and bad company, among diviners, philosophers, saints, witches, charlatans, hypnotists.  Many a heart has been broken, like that of Mr. Dale Owen,