ld vagabond who pretended to possess supernatural powers; and
emphasis was laid on the alleged fact that he had boasted of having
revenged himself on Mompesson for the confiscation of his drum. Luckily
for him, Mompesson was not the power in Salisbury that he was in
Tedworth, and the drummer's eloquent defense moved the jury to acquit
him and to send him on his way rejoicing. Thereafter he was never again
heard of in Wiltshire or in the pages of history, and with his
disappearance came an end to the knockings, the corpse candles, and all
the other uncanny phenomena that had made life a ceaseless nightmare for
the Mompessons.

Such is the astonishing story of the drummer of Tedworth, still cited by
the superstitious as a capital example of the intermeddling of
superhuman agencies in human affairs, and still mentioned by the
skeptical as one of the most amusing and most successful hoaxes on
record.

To us of the twentieth century its chief significance lies in the
striking resemblance between the tribulations of the Mompesson family
and the so-called physical phenomena of modern spiritism. All who have
attended spiritistic seances are familiar with the invisible and
perverse ghost, which, for no apparent reason other than to mystify,
causes furniture to gyrate violently, rings bells, plays tambourines,
levitates the "medium," and favors the spectators with sundry taps,
pinches, even blows. Precisely thus was it with the doings at Mompesson
House, where many of the salient phenomena of modern spiritism were
anticipated nearly two hundred and fifty years ago.

The inference is irresistible that a more or less intimate connection
exists between the disturbances at Tedworth and the triumphs of
latter-day mediumship, and it thus becomes doubly interesting to examine
the evidence for and against the supernatural origin of the performances
that so perplexed the Englishmen of the Restoration. This evidence is
presented in far greater detail than is here possible, in a curious
document written by the Reverend Joseph Glanvill, a clergyman of the
Church of England and an eye witness of some of the phenomena. His point
of view is that of an ardent believer in the verity of witchcraft, and
his narrative of the Tedworth affair finds place in a treatise designed
to discomfit those irreligious persons who maintained the opposite.[B]
It is therefore evident that his account of the case is to be regarded
as a piece of special pleading,