at
that time, endorsed its action and considered the same all right."

I might here enter into a description of the various forms of modern
spiritualistic representations. It would be a waste of time. I wish,
however, to allude more particularly just here to one of the "evidences"
which Mrs. Ann Leah Underhill apparently values most highly in connection
with the claim of inherent and hereditary "mediumistic" powers residing in
certain individuals and families. This is the somewhat noted so-called
exhibition of "mediumistic" ability by a child of Mrs. Kate Fox Jencken, a
babe, only about six weeks old at the time that it began. It is needless
to go into all the details of the wonders attributed to little "Ferdie"
Jencken, now a fine lad of fifteen, which rest wholly upon the testimony
of persons who were interested in magnifying them to the greatest extent.
Shadowy forms are said to have appeared to his nurse while she was
watching him. At three months he was said to have articulated "Mamma!" But
the cap of the climax is the feat he is said to have performed when not
six months old. As he was restless one day, his mother gave him a piece of
blotting paper and a pencil to play with. He made some marks on the paper
and dropped it. When his mother picked it up she exclaimed to Mrs.
Underhill, the only other person present:

"See here, he was written something."

It is pretended that on one side of the blotting paper was the message:

"Grandma is here.
"BOYSIE."

Later and up to the close of his first year, he was said to write other
messages, but all under like circumstances.

Mrs. Underhill lays great stress upon these "manifestations" in two
portions of her work.

The simple and only comment to be made upon them is, that Mrs. Catherine
Fox Jencken now declares that they were fraudulent. The messages were in
every case written upon the paper before it was placed in the baby's
hands, the mother knowing, of course, that a child a few months old would
not retain anything very long in its grasp, that those who chanced to be
present would not observe, unless previously warned, whether it was
wholly blank or not, and that the picking up of the paper from the floor
would give ample opportunity to turn undermost the side on which the child
may have really scratched some unmeaning marks.

So much for that and kindred marvels of infant "mediumship."

"Ferdie" Jencken, so far as is known, has never, si