miracles. For myself, I must suspend judgment;
waiting to see what in these wonderful times--some further development
of electricity, for example, may haply produce for us. After recent
marvels of the telephone, microphone, photophone, and I know not what
others, why should not some Edison or Lane Fox stumble upon a form of
psychic force emanating from our personal nervous organisation, and
capable of operating physically on all things round us, the immaterial
conquering the material it pervades? Some such vague theory as to
spiritualistic manifestations may be a far more rational as well as
pleasing explanation of these modern marvels than to suppose that our
dead friends come at any medium's summons to move tables, talk bad
grammar, and play accordions; or that angels, good and evil, are allowed
to be employed in mystifying or terrifying the frivolous assisters at a
_seance_.

Beyond and after this, I might add, but for its too great length, the
indisputable testimony of certain friends of mine as to inexplicable
writings on locked slates and paper, the revelation of secrets, nay
visible apparitions, and both records of the secret past and revelations
of the still more secret future afterwards fulfilled,--to all which I
cannot, as an honest man and a believer in human evidence, refuse to
give a distinct testimony, even though conjurors perpetually baffle our
confused judgment.

In this connection I will extract from one of my Archive-books the
curious story of a mysterious key in which my family are still
interested: for the secret is not yet solved. In the fourteenth volume,
then, of my Archives occurs this long note, accompanied by the drawing
which I made years ago of the weird-looking key: with a loose ring
handle, a threefold staircase body, and a strangely ringed column.

"My father died in his sleep, December 8, 1844, at Southwick House, in
Windsor Park, on the same night after its owner, Lord Limerick, had also
died there in his arms, my father having been his medical friend for
thirty years. My father used to carry in his pocket a strange key,
whereof the figure was very unusual, as it folded up, and though large
he carried it in his pocket habitually: and he used to say in his
quietly humorous and reserved manner, 'under that key lies a fortune;'
my mother and I and others remember this well. When I came to be
executor, there was nearly nothing to guide me as to the amount of my
father's property,--and I