races, the insertion of live
coals among the intricacies of Mr. S. C. Hall's exuberant locks, are but
the A B C which have led them to their present advanced position. These
physical "manifestations" may do for the neophytes. They are the
initiated. I am the initiated; or I ought to be, if patience and
perseverance constitute serving an apprenticeship. I have devoted a good
portion of my late life to the study. I have given up valuable evenings
through several consecutive winters to dark seances; have had my hair
pulled, my head thumped with paper tubes, and suffered other indignities
at the hands of the "Invisibles;" and, worse than all, my friends have
looked upon me as a lunatic for my pains, and if my enemies could have
wrought their will they would have incarcerated me as non compos, or
made an auto-da-fe of me as a heretic years ago.

Through sheer length of service, then, if on no other account, I had
grown somewhat blase with the ordinary run of manifestations. Spirit
Faces no longer interest me; for I seek among them in vain the
lineaments of my departed friends. Spirit Hands I shake as unconcernedly
as I do those of my familiar acquaintances at the club or in the street.
I have even cut off a portion of the veil of Miss Florence Maple, the
Aberdeen Spirit, and gone away with it in my pocket: so that it was, at
all events, a new sensation when I received an invitation to be present
at a trance seance, where one of the Higher Spirits communicated to the
assembled things undreamed of in mundane philosophy. The sitting was a
strictly private one; so I must not mention names or localities; but
this does not matter, as I have no marvels in the vulgar sense of the
word to relate: only Higher Teachings, which will do just as well with
asterisks or initials as with the names in full.

The scene, then, was an artist's studio at the West End of London, and
the medium a magnetic lady with whom I had frequently sat before, though
not for the "Higher" teachings. Her instruction had so far come in the
shape of very vigorous raps, which ruined my knuckles to imitate them,
and in levitation of a small and volatile chess table, which resisted
all my efforts to keep it to the paths of propriety. This lady was not
young; and I confess frankly this was, to my thinking, an advantage.
When I once told a sceptical friend about Miss Florence Cook's seance,
and added, triumphantly, "Why, she's a pretty little simple girl of
sixteen,"