discontentedly.

"By no means," I retorted. "Maxwell plainly says, 'Where the "control"
is insisting upon something which I do not like, I politely resist, and
end by getting my own way.' Note the 'politely.' In short, he recognizes
that a genuine medium is a very precious instrument, and he does not
begin by clubbing him--or her--into submission. For all their wondrous
powers, the people who possess these powers are very weak. They are not
allowed to make anything more than a living out of the practise of the
magic, and they live under the threat of having the power withdrawn.
They are helpless in the face of a challenge to produce the phenomena,
and yet the hidden forces are themselves helpless without them--"

"Is the table throbbing?" asked Brierly.

"I don't feel it."

"Have you ever had any convincing evidence of this psychic force--such
as movement of objects without contact?" asked Harris.

"Yes. I have had a table rise at least twenty inches from the floor in
the full light, with no one present but the medium and myself, and while
our finger-tips alone touched the top. It felt as if it were floating in
a thick and resilient liquid, and when I pressed upon it, it oscillated,
in a curious way, as if the power were applied from below and in the
centre of the table. The psychic was a young girl, and I am certain
played no trick. I could see her feet on the floor, and her finger-tips
were, like mine, on the top of the table. This was the clearest test of
levitation I ever had, but the lifting of a pencil in independent
writing is the same thing in effect."

"I see you have acquired all the 'patter,'" remarked Miller.

"Oh, yes indeed; all the 'patter,' and some of the guile. For instance,
when I want to use 'those who have passed on' I do so, and when I don't
I invent means to deceive them."

Mrs. Quigg caught me up on that. "Can you deceive 'them'?"

"I don't know that I do, really; but, at any rate, 'they' are not always
mind-readers--that I have proved very conclusively. In all my experience
I have never had any satisfactory evidence of the clairvoyance of these
manifesting intelligences."

"I thought 'they' could read one's every thought."

"I do not find that 'they' can read so much as _one_ of my thoughts, and
I would not invest a dollar on their recommendations. Seldom does so
much as a familiar name come up in my sittings, and no message of any
intimate sort has ever come from the shadow world fo