the platform occupied by a
tiny cabinet, unlike that of the Davenports in that it was open in
front, with a green curtain, which I could see was destined to be let
down during the performance of the phenomenal manifestations. There was
a camp-stool inside the cabinet; a number of cane-bottomed chairs on the
platform, and also the various properties of a spirit seance, familiar
to me from long experience, guitar, fiddle, handbells, tambourine, &c.
One adjunct alone was new; and that was a green stable bucket, destined,
I could not doubt, to figure in what my Rimmel-scented programme
promised as the climax of Part I.--the "Great Pail Sensation." Presently
Colonel Fay, in a brief speech, nasal but fluent, introduced the
subject, and asked two gentlemen to act as a Committee of Inspection.
Two stepped forward immediately--indeed too immediately, as the result
proved; one a "citizen of this city," as Colonel Fay had requested; but
the other a Hindoo young gentleman, who, I believe, lost the confidence
of the audience at once from his foreign face and Oriental garb.
However, they were first to the front, and so were elected, and
proceeded at once to "examine" the cabinet in that obviously helpless
and imperfect way common to novices who work with the gaze of an
audience upon them. Then, from a side door, stage left, enter the
Indescribable Phenomenon. A pretty young lady, yes, and with light
frizzled hair to any extent. There was perhaps "a spirit look within her
eyes;" but then I have often found this to be the case with young ladies
of twenty. Her dress of light silk was beyond reproach. I had seen
Florence Cook and Miss Showers lately; and,--well, I thought those two,
with the assistance of Miss Annie Eva Fay, would have made a very pretty
model for a statuette of the Three Graces.

Miss Fay, after being described by the Colonel vaguely enough as "of the
United States," was bound on both wrists with strips of calico; the
knots were sewn by the European gentleman--as distinguished from the
Asiatic youth. He was not quite au fait at the needle, but got through
it in time. Miss Fay was then placed on the camp-stool, her wrists
fastened behind her, and her neck also secured to a ring screwed into
the back of the cabinet. A rope was tied round her ankles, and passed
right to the front of the stage, where the Hindoo youth was located and
bidden hold it taut, which he did conscientiously, his attitude being
what Colman describes