e
further experiment to-night. What are your sensations now?"

"I am almost paralyzed, and still deaf, too, but that often happens. My
feet are as if they did not exist."

"But your mind is perfectly normal?"

"Yes, it seems to be."

Soon after this I returned to my seat; the cone was lifted high into the
air silently, broken apart, and then, with the small end jangling inside
the larger one, was carried over the table and back to the floor. It
fell with a bang that seemed final and decisive. "That is 'good-bye,'"
said Mrs. Smiley.

Upon lighting the gas we found our victim as before, sitting absolutely
as we had left her. The table edge was twenty-four inches from her
finger-tips. The place where the cone lay, which we had marked with
chalk when it was first drummed upon, was thirty-six inches from one
hand and forty inches from the other. But the most inexplicable of
all--the tangible, permanent record--was the seven sheets of paper which
were lying upon a couch six feet from Mrs. Smiley's left hand. _They
were all written upon legibly, and pinned together with a black pin,
which had been thrust through the writing._ "Wilbur" had scrawled his
name, Mrs. Fowler's father's name was signed to a message, and there
were other signatures unknown to any of us. The pencil was on the
carpet, forty inches from Mrs. Smiley's hand. The leaves of paper, at
the moment when they were grasped and lifted, were more than forty
inches from her finger-tips. How this was done I do not know: but of
this I am absolutely sure: the psychic did not remove them from the
table by means of her ordinary, material limbs. Barring the failure to
disassociate her voice from that of "Wilbur," she had met every demand
upon her. Her powers were truly magical. I cannot say I _saw_ the cone
move, but I have proven that the psychic did not surreptitiously touch
it or fraudulently write upon the papers during this sitting. I cannot
swear that Fowler was controlling his wife's hands while the cone was
floating (and while I held the psychic's imprisoned hands), but I
_believe_ he was. In short, barring the one sense of sight--an
all-important one, I admit--these happenings were convincing and fitted
in with phenomena which I had secured with other psychics.

Nevertheless, I was not satisfied. I wanted Brierly, or some other fifth
person, in the room, in order that _both_ of the psychic's hands could
be controlled at the same time that Mrs. Fowler's were