e development of the
case. After having been for some time troubled by the rappings she
began to feel involuntary motions in her right hand which increased to
constantly recurring violent exercise of the muscles, when it occurred
to her from the character of the motions that the hand wanted a pencil
to write and she laid paper and a pencil on the table. Her hand then
took possession of the pencil and began to scrawl aimlessly over the
paper until, after the interval of many days, the agency seemed to
have sufficient control over the muscles to form legible letters. This
was a source of amusement to her, and, at the time we made our entry
into the investigation, the hand wrote legibly and neatly in reply to
mental, i.e. unspoken, questions, she having no control of the muscles
so long as the "influence," which was the name she applied to whatever
it might be, chose to use it. She knew what was written only when the
writing was finished and she read it, as we did; and the writing was,
as we found by experiment, quite as regular and well formed when her
eyes were bandaged as when she was looking at her work. As a further
test of the involuntary character of this we not only tried her with
her eyes bandaged, but by my brother talking with her from one side of
the table, while she was writing in reply to my mental questions on
the other; she talked with him on one subject at the same moment in
which she wrote to me on another.

In what was given under these circumstances she wrote for us the
replies in conversations with what purported to be the spirits of
three deceased relatives, the wife of my brother, my brother Alfred,
and cousin Harvey, who had for several years been my most intimate
and beloved friend; and the handwriting of the three series of
communication was a better imitation of their writing than I, knowing
it, could have produced. That of my sister-in-law I was not so
familiar with, though my brother recognized it as that of his wife,
but that of our brother was a perfect reproduction down to the
smallest accidents, and that which was given as the responses of
my cousin equally so, and executed with a rapidity of which I was
incapable--a large scrawling hand, that of our brother being of a
character entirely opposed, slowly and laboriously formed, with
occasional omissions of the last line of a final _n_, quite common in
his writing. The girl had never known either of these relatives. One
of the questions I as