rits will
answer to any name with which they are addressed. The Medium who
conducted the seance came to me and said, 'There's a Spirit in the
Cabinet who says she's your niece.' Very thoughtlessly I replied, 'But I
haven't any niece in the Spirit world.' The instant after I had spoken,
I felt my mistake. You must never repel any Spirit that comes to you. It
throws a coolness over your whole intercourse with that particular
Spirit-band; no Spirit from it will be likely to come to you again. No
surface of madrepores is more sensitive to a touch than a Cabinet full
of Spirits to a chilling syllable of failure. To regain my lost
position, therefore, I said hastily, 'But can it be Effie?' (It was a
mere hap-hazard name; I know no 'Effie.') The Medium went to the Cabinet
and returned with the answer, 'She says she's Effie, and she wants to
see you.' Of course, I went with alacrity to where the curtains of the
Cabinet stood open, and there, just within it, saw a Spirit whom I
recognized as having appeared once before during the evening with Marie,
when the latter had materialized as a sailor-boy, and the two had danced
a Spiritualist horn-pipe to the tune of 'A Life on the Ocean Wave.' 'Oh,
Effie dear,' I said, 'is that you?' 'Yes, dear Uncle, I wanted so much
to see you.' 'Forgive me, dear,' I pleaded, 'for having forgotten you.'
'Certainly I will, dear Uncle, and won't you bring me a necklace, too?'
'Certainly, dear,' I replied, 'when I come here again.' I have never
been there since.

Thus is illustrated what will be, I think, the experience of every one
who cares to apply this test to Materialized Spirits. When the
investigator is unknown to the Medium, a Spirit materialized through
that Medium will confess to any name in the heavens above or the earth
beneath, in the world of fiction or the world of reality. Of course, it
would not do to ask a Spirit whether or not it were some well-known
public, or equally well-known fictitious, character. You would be
repelled if you should ask a Spirit if it were 'Yankee Doodle,' but I am
by no means sure that it would not confess to being 'Cap'en Good'in,'
who accompanied Yankee Doodle and his father on their trip to town, and
whose name is less familiar in men's mouths. All the good, earnest,
simple-hearted folk who attend these seances ask the Spirits, when they
appear to them for the first time, if they are father, mother, brother,
husband, wife, or sister, and the Spirit will in e