rinoline, and making her look
like some of the ladies out of a Noah's ark.

During this period my wife and I constantly sat alone, and she wrote. It
is no disrespect to her to say that writing is not her forte, but the
communications she made in this way were exceedingly voluminous, and
couched in a particularly happy style, though on subjects far above the
range of ordinary compositions. We never obtained a single communication
purporting to come from our child, but the position claimed by the
communicating intelligence was that of his spirit-guardian.

Having now probably said enough in these confessions to convince every
non-spiritualist that I am insane, because I believed the evidence of my
senses, and even ventured to look into matters so unorthodox and
unscientific as mesmerism and spiritualism, I go on to "make a clean
breast," and set myself wrong with the other moiety of my readers. I
must candidly confess that the experiences of this year (1866) did not
confirm my sudden conviction of the spiritual agency in these phenomena.
I drifted back, in fact, to my previous position, accepting the
phenomena, but holding the cause an open question. The preface to the
book, "From Matter to Spirit," exactly expressed--shall I say
expresses?--my state of mind. There is one passage in that preface which
appears to me to clinch the difficulty--"I am perfectly convinced that I
have both seen and heard, in a manner which should make unbelief
impossible, things called spiritual, which cannot be taken by a
reasonable being to be capable of explanation by imposture, coincidence,
or mistake. So far I feel the ground firm under me. But when it comes to
what is the cause of these phenomena I find I cannot adopt any
explanation which has yet been suggested. If I were bound to choose
among things which I can conceive, I should say that there is some sort
of action--some sort of combination of will, intellect, and physical
power, which is not that of any of the human beings present. But
thinking it very likely that the universe may contain a few agencies,
say half a million, about which no man knows anything, I cannot but
suspect that a small proportion of these agencies, say five thousand,
may be severally competent to the production of all the phenomena, or
may be quite up to the task among them. _The physical explanations which
I have seen are easy, but miserably insufficient: the spiritual
hypothesis is sufficient but ponderously