kers and exposure of their
wrongs; a visit to the Cradley Heath chain-makers, speeches to them,
writing for them; a contest for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets
division, and triumphant return at the head of the poll. Such were
some of the ways in which the autumn days were spent, to say nothing
of scores of lectures--Secularist, Labour, Socialist--and scores of
articles written for the winning of daily bread. When the School Board
work was added I felt that I had as much work as one woman's strength
could do.

Thus was ushered in 1889, the to me never-to-be-forgotten year in
which I found my way "Home," and had the priceless good fortune of
meeting, and of becoming the pupil of, H.P. Blavatsky. Ever more and
more had been growing on me the feeling that something more than I had
was needed for the cure of social ills. The Socialist position
sufficed on the economic side, but where to gain the inspiration, the
motive, which should lead to the realisation of the Brotherhood of
Man? Our efforts to really organise bands of unselfish workers had
failed. Much indeed had been done, but there was not a real movement
of self-sacrificing devotion, in which men worked for Love's sake
only, and asked but to give, not to take. Where was the material for
the nobler Social Order, where the hewn stones for the building of the
Temple of Man? A great despair would oppress me as I sought for such a
movement and found it not.

[Illustration: MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.]

Not only so; but since 1886 there had been slowly growing up a
conviction that my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind
were other than, more than, I had dreamed. Psychology was advancing
with rapid strides; hypnotic experiments were revealing unlooked-for
complexities in human consciousness, strange riddles of multiplex
personalities, and, most startling of all, vivid intensities of mental
action when the brain, that should be the generator of thought, was
reduced to a comatose state. Fact after fact came hurtling in upon me,
demanding explanation I was incompetent to give. I studied the
obscurer sides of consciousness, dreams, hallucinations, illusions,
insanity. Into the darkness shot a ray of light--A.P. Sinnett's
"Occult World," with its wonderfully suggestive letters, expounding
not the supernatural but a nature under law, wider than I had dared to
conceive. I added Spiritualism to my studies, experimenting privately,
finding the phenomen