rs old. There
is no one by the name of Ellen connected with the family. She did think
I would marry, but knew that I had plenty of money to buy an outfit.)

3. "Do not dress in mourning for me, for if it be true the spirit can
return I want to see you dressed in light, not black. Not for me now, my
dear sister Bessie. Try to be cheerful and happy through your married
life, and when you hear from me--this for you a copy, 'remember sister
Hannah is not dead, only passed out of the body.' I will give you a
beautiful description of our life there and of my darling mother if I
see her." (Hannah always wore black, and often said it would be wicked
for me to take it off, for my child always said, "Mamma, you will always
wear black for me," and I have worn black for twenty years, ever since
my child died.)

And so forth.

Phinuit's elucubrations were six good manuscript pages long. Except
Hannah Wild's name everything was wrong. And yet Mr J. W. Piper affirms
that during all the sittings he had the feeling that he was talking to
the spirit of Miss Hannah Wild. Phinuit was asked for a description of
the communicator; all the details were false. After this it is
unnecessary to say that the letter Miss Hannah Wild had written before
her death, when opened by Professor James, after receiving the Phinuit
letter, differed totally from that document.

So far the Blodgett-Wild case is on the whole commonplace. Phinuit lied
when he pretended to communicate with Hannah Wild's spirit; for there is
no more reason here than elsewhere to suppose conscious fraud on Mrs
Piper's part. But this is the point at which the case becomes
interesting, and where it may perhaps throw some light on Phinuit's
manner of procuring information, and on the character of Phinuit
himself. If we judged only from this case, it would seem that Phinuit
was merely a secondary personality of Mrs Piper, possessing the
extraordinary power of reading people's minds unhindered by distance.
But let us say at once that a number of other cases render the problem
much more complex. The conclusion to be drawn from what follows is, that
if Phinuit is really what he asserts that he is, he does not draw his
information only from disincarnated spirits, whom he is supposed to
perceive objectively; he also reads the minds of the living, and with
the information he finds there he creates personages, apparently
life-like, and bearing a strong resemblance to deceased persons.

On