ed effort of will was, in combination with a mysterious
supernatural agency, to move the board; and the board naturally not
only moved but, carrying the pencil along with it, wrote the answers
required and desired by the credulous consulters of the wooden
oracle.

The thing would have been indescribably ludicrous but for the
terrible effect it was having upon the poor people who were
practising upon themselves with it. Excitable young girls of fifteen
and sixteen, half hysterical with their wonderment; ignorant,
afflicted women, who had lost dear relations and friends by death;
superstitious lads, and men too incapable of consecutive reasoning
to perceive the necessary connection between cause and effect; the
whole community, in short, seemed to me catching the credulous
infection one from another, and to be in a state bordering upon
insanity or idiocy.

A young lady-friend of mine, a miserable invalid, was so possessed
with faith in this wooden demon that, after resisting repeated
entreaties on her part to witness some of its performances, I at
length, at her earnest request, saw her operate upon it. The writing
was almost unintelligible, and undoubtedly produced by the vibrating
impulse given to the machine by her nervous, feeble, diaphanous
hands. Finding my scepticism invincible by these means, my friend
implored me to think in my own mind a question, and see if
Planchette would not answer it. I yielded at last to her all but
hysterical importunity, and thought of an heraldic question
concerning the crest on a ring which I wore, which I felt was quite
beyond Planchette's penetration; but while we sat in quiet
expectation of the reply, which of course did not come, my friend's
mother--a sober, middle-aged lady, habitually behaving herself with
perfect reasonableness, and, moreover, without a spark of
imagination (but that, indeed, was rather of course; belief in such
supernatural agencies betokening, in my opinion, an absence of
poetical imagination, as well as of spiritual faith), practical,
sensible, commonplace, without a touch of nonsense of any kind about
her, as I had always supposed--sat opposite the _machine infernale_,
over which her daughter's fingers hung suspended, and as the answer
did not come, broke out for all the world like one of Baal's
prophets of old