se words,
and to having turned my head and stared hard at the book-cases behind
me.

"But they--I mean something--rapped one night before you came," I
suggested.

"Yes, and they might rap after I was gone. The simple noises are not
uncommon in places where there are no better means of communication. The
extreme methods of expression, such as you have witnessed this winter,
are, I doubt not, practicable only when the system of a medium is
accessible. They write all sorts of messages for you. You would ridicule
them. I do not repeat them. You and Cousin Alison do not see, hear, feel
as I do. We are differently made. There are lying spirits and true, good
spirits and bad. Sometimes the bad deceive and distress me, but
sometimes--sometimes my mother comes."

She lowered her voice reverently, and I was fain to hush the laugh upon
my lips. Whatever the thing might prove to be to me, it was daily
comfort to the nervous, unstrung, lonely woman, whom to suspect of
trickery I began to think was worse than stupidity.

From the time of my midnight experience in the library I allowed myself
to look a little further into the subject of "communications." Miss
Fellows wrote them out at my request whenever they "came" to her.
Writers on Spiritualism have described the process so frequently, that
it is unnecessary for me to dwell upon it at length. The influences took
her unawares in the usual manner. In the usual manner her arm--to all
appearance the passive instrument of some unseen, powerful
agency--jerked and glided over the paper, writing in curious, scrawly
characters, never in her own neat little old-fashioned hand, messages of
which, on coming out from the "trance" state, she would have-no memory;
of many of which at any time she could have had no comprehension. These
messages assumed every variety of character from the tragic to the
ridiculous, and a large portion of them had no point whatever.

One day Benjamin West desired to give me lessons in oil-painting. The
next, my brother Joseph, dead now for ten years, asked forgiveness for
his share in a little quarrel of ours which had embittered a portion of
his last days,--of which, by the way, I am confident that Miss Fellows
knew nothing. At one time I received a long discourse enlightening me on
the arrangement of the "spheres" in the disembodied state of existence.
At another, Alison's dead grandfather pathetically reminded her of a
certain Sunday afternoon at "meetin'" l