all of which she overacted
considerably. I may be wrong, of course, but I fancied the fair
lecturess was as dissatisfied with No. 6 as I was. The audience was an
indulgent one, and thought it splendid. Mr. Burns sat on the table and
yawned. I relapsed into Tyndall, and wondered what he would have said
about it all; or, at least, I did not wonder, for I knew he would have
consigned us all to the nearest lunatic asylum as exceptions to the rule
that the European has so many more cubic inches of cerebral development
than the Papuan.

When it was drawing near ten, Miss Chandos brought the proceedings to a
close by animating--like Pygmalion--her waxwork statues. She apologized
once more, in a few well-chosen sentences, for what she was pleased to
call her "failure," but the audience would not hear of the term, and
applauded to the echo, only there was no room for an echo in the
Progressive Institute. The young man, No. 1, who I found was a spirit
medium, wound up by an address from his Indian guide on the subject of
"control."

I confess I failed to gather from the perambulating youth and maidens
No. 1 and 3, or the impersonations of No. 6, any signs of the revival
alluded to by Mr. Burns at the outset; and there was not the remotest
connexion with the healing art. In fact, nobody seemed suffering from
anything except heat.

Miss Chandos said to me, however, in a sensible conversation with which
she favoured me in private, that all she had attempted to show was but
the lowest manifestation of a power which had far higher ends in view.
She doubted almost whether it was not something like sacrilege to use
such a power for playing tricks and gratifying curiosity.

She was thoroughly in earnest; and laboured both physically during the
evening and logically in her after-discourse, with an energy which some
persons would have said was worthy of a better cause.

It was nearly eleven when I left the miniature hall of the Progressive
Institute, and as I passed along the streets, digesting what I had seen
and heard during the evening, I took myself to task severely--as it is
always well to do, if only to prevent somebody else doing it for me--and
asked whether, if the lecturess had not been a lecturess but a
lecturer--if being a lecturess she weighed eighteen stone, or was old
and wizen, or dropped her h's--whether I should have stayed three mortal
hours in that stuffy room, and I frankly own I came to the conclusion I
should _