ing on another
table. Lytton, the story goes, begged permission to keep the cross as a
souvenir, and promised that he would remember the spirit's injunction.
For Home, of course, the incident was a splendid advertisement, as were
the extravagant reports spread broadcast by other visitors.
Consequently, when he visited Italy in the autumn as the guest of one of
his English patrons, he gained instant recognition and was enabled to
embark with phenomenal ease on his Continental crusade.

In order to reach the most striking manifestations of his peculiar
ability, we must pass hurriedly over the events of the next few years,
although they are perhaps the most picturesque of his career, including
as they do seances with the third Napoleon and his Empress, with the
King of Prussia, and with the Emperor of Russia. In Russia he was
married to the daughter of a noble Russian family, and for groomsmen at
his wedding had Count Alexis Tolstoi, the famous poet, and Count
Bobrinski, one of the Emperor's chamberlains. This was in 1858, and
shortly afterward he returned to England to repeat his spiritistic
triumphs of 1855, and increase the already large group of influential
and titled friends whose doors were ever open to him. Had it not been
for their generosity, it is difficult, indeed, to see how he could have
lived, for his time was almost altogether devoted to the practice of
spiritism, and he was never known to accept a fee for a seance. As it
was, he lived very well, now the guest of one, now of another, and the
frequent recipient of costly presents. From England he fared back to the
Continent, again traversing it by leisurely stages. Thus nearly a decade
passed before the occurrence of the first of the several phenomena that
have won Home an enduring place among the greatest lights of spiritism.

At that time his English patrons included the Viscount Adare and the
Master of Lindsay, who have since become respectively the Earl of
Dunraven and the Earl of Crawford. They were sitting one evening
(December 16, 1868) in an upper room of a house in London with Home and
a Captain Wynne, when Home suddenly left the room and entered the
adjoining chamber. The opening of a window was then heard, and the next
moment, to the amazement of all three, they perceived Home's form
floating in the dim moonlight outside the window of the room in which
they were seated. For an instant it hovered there, at a height of fully
seventy feet above the p