and others as when he is enjoying some light and temperate
amusement.'

Thus there was nothing in Home to dominate, or even to excite personal
curiosity. He and his more intimate friends, not marchionesses but
middle-class people, corresponded in a style of rather distasteful
effusiveness. He was a pleasant young man in a house, not a Don Juan.
I have never heard a whisper about light loves--unless Mr. Hamilton
Aide, to be quoted later, reports such a whisper--not a word against
his private character, except that he allowed a terribly vulgar rich
woman to adopt him, and give him a very large sum of money, later
withdrawn. We shall see that she probably had mixed motives both for
giving and for withdrawing the gift, but it was asserted, though on
evidence far from sound, that 'the spirits' had rapped out a command
to give Home some thirty thousand pounds. Spirits ought not to do
these things, and, certainly, it would have been wiser in Home to
refuse the widow's gold even if they did. Beyond this one affair, and
an alleged case of imposture at a _seance_, Home's private character
raised no scandals that have survived into our knowledge. It is a very
strange thing, as we shall see, that the origin of Home's miracles in
broad daylight or artificial light, could never be traced to fraud,
or, indeed, to any known cause; while the one case in which imposture
is alleged on first-hand evidence occurred under conditions of light
so bad as to make detection as difficult as belief in such
circumstances, ought to have been impossible. It is not easy to feel
sure that we have certainly detected a fraud in a dim light; but it is
absurd to believe in a miracle, when the conditions of light are such
as to make detection difficult.

Given this mild young musical man, the problems of how he achieved his
social successes, and how he managed to escape exposure, if he did his
miracles by conjuring, are almost equally perplexing. The second
puzzle is perhaps the less hard of the two, for Home did not make
money as a medium (though he took money's worth), and in private
society few seized and held the mystic hands that moved about, or when
they seized they could not hold them. The hands melted away, so people
said.

A sketch of Home's life must now be given.[16] He was born in 1833, at
Currie, a village near Edinburgh. In his later years he sent to his
second wife a photograph of the street of cottages beside the burn, in
one of which h