. Of course, we
were too young, then, to have been successful very long in deluding
people, had it not been for an arrangement such as this.

"Her own daughter, Lizzie, had no manner of patience with her transparent
pretence.

"'Ma,' she would exclaim, when Leah attempted to impress her with a belief
in some of the frauds which she perpetrated, 'how can you ever pretend
that that is done by the spirits? I am ashamed to know even that you do
such things--it's dreadfully wicked.'"

Some day it will be known that one other person beside Lizzie, who
afterwards occupied a filial relation to this woman, detested even more
strongly the atmosphere of hypocrisy and deceit with which the latter
surrounded herself, and hated, too, the rankling obligation under which an
unkind fate had placed her.

It is not so wonderful that men of learning and originality were drawn to
the mysterious seances of the Fox girls, when it is considered that they
became a sort of fashionable "fad," as the receptions of Mesmer did in the
last century in Paris. There were great opportunities there for studying
human nature, and the period was one of a notable awakening of scientific
and transcendental speculation. Such men as Greeley, Bancroft, Fenimore
Cooper, Bryant, N. P. Willis, Dr. Francis, John Bigelow, Ripley, Dr.
Griswold, Dr. Eliphalet Nott, Theodore Parker, William M. Thackeray, James
Freeman Clarke, Thomas M. Foote and Bayard Taylor, and women of the
intellectual strength of Alice Cary and Harriet Beecher Stowe became
deeply interested. But nearly all of these lost their interest in
Spiritualism in time, for they became morally, if not positively
convinced, that the effects produced were the mere result of fraud.

There was another attraction, however, in those early days. The younger
"mediums" were both very pretty and very young. Sympathy and
commiseration, as much as aught else, often drew visitors to them, and
caused such visitors to continue their friends. Thus, we find that Horace
Greeley and Dr. Elisha Kent Kane became important factors in the lives of
both of these interesting creatures, the former educating Katie, and the
latter striving to form Maggie's mind and to reform her character with
the express object of making her his wife.

Mrs. Kane, in commenting upon the life which she led at that time, says:

"When I look back, I can only say in defense of my depraved calling, that
I took not the slightest pleasure in it. The nov