ds of the psychic crept timidly up my arm and touched my cheek.
'Thank you! Thank you! Oh, the cheer! Oh, the light!' she cried,
ecstatically. 'I see! I know! Good-bye!' And with a sigh of ecstasy the
voice ceased.

"I can hardly express to you the vivid and yet sombre impression this
made upon me. It was as if a chilled and weary bird, having winged its
way from the winter's midnight into a warm room, had been heartened and
invigorated, had rushed away confident and swift to the sun-lands of the
South.

"One by one other 'earth-bound souls' who, from one cause or another,
were 'unable to find their way upward,' came into our ken like chilled
and desperate bats condemned to whirl in endless outer darkness and
silence--poor, abortive, anomalous shadows, whose voices pleaded
piteously for release. Nameless, agonized, bewildered, they clung like
moths to the light of our psychic.

"Some of them appeared to be suffering all the terrors of the damned,
and as they moaned and pleaded for light, the lovely face of my friend
was convulsed with agony and her hands fluttered about like wounded
birds. Singular conception! Wonderful power of suggestion!

"At length, with a glad cry, the last of these blind souls saw, sighed
with happiness, and seemed to vanish upward, as if into some
unfathomable, fourth-dimension heaven. Then the sweet first spirit, the
woman with the glad children, returned to say to Miss Wilcox, 'Be
happy--George _is_ coming back to you.'

"After she passed, my friend opened her eyes as before, clearly,
smilingly, and said, 'Have you had enough?'

"'Plenty,' said I. 'You nearly took my eye out in your dramatic fervor.
I must say your ghosts are most unhappy creatures.'

"She became very serious. 'Please don't think that these spirits are my
affinities. My work is purely philanthropic, so Theodore Parker used to
tell mother. It was my duty, he said, to comfort the cheerless, to
liberate the earth-bound, and so I had to have these poor creatures
waiting around. That's why I gave it up. It got to be too dreadful. We
never could tell what would come next. Murderers and barnburners and
every other accursed spirit seemed to be privileged to come into my poor
empty house and abuse it, although Parker and his band promised to
protect me. I stopped it. I will not sit again,' she said, firmly. 'I
don't like it. It would be bad enough to be dominated by one's dead
friends, or the dead friends of one's friends, but t