en he tried to
drink, shaken by an unseen elbow; his dressing-cases disappeared from
his bureau and hid themselves, none knew how or when, in his closets and
under his bed; mysterious uncanny figures, dressed in his best clothes
and stuffed with straw, stood in his room when he came to it at night;
his candlesticks walked, untouched by hands, from the mantel into space;
keys and chains fell from the air at his feet; and raw turnips dropped
from the solid ceiling into his soup-plate.

"Well, Garth," said I one day, confidentially, "how are things? Begin to
have a 'realizing sense' of it, eh?"

"Let me think awhile," he answered.

I left him to his reflections, and devoted my attention for a day or two
to Gertrude Fellows. She seemed to have been of late receiving less
ridiculous, less indefinite, and more important messages from her
spiritual acquaintances. The burden of them was directed at me. They
were sometimes confused, but never contradictory, and the sum of them,
as I cast it up, was this:--

A former occupant of the house, one Mr. Timothy Jabbers, had been in
early life connected in the dry-goods business with my wife's father,
and had, unknown to any but himself, defrauded his partner of a
considerable sum for a young swindler,--some five hundred dollars, I
think. This fact, kept in the knowledge only of God and the guilty man,
had been his agony since his death. In the parlance of Spiritualism, he
could never "purify" his soul and rise to a higher "sphere" till he had
made restitution,--though to that part of the communications I paid
little attention. This money my wife, as her father's sole living heir,
was entitled to, and this money I was desired to claim for her from Mr.
Jabbers's estate, then in the hands of some wealthy nephews.

I made some inquiries which led to the discovery that there had been a
Mr. Timothy Jabbers once the occupant of our house, that he had at one
period been in business with my wife's father, that he was now many
years dead, and that his nephews in New York were his heirs. We never
attempted to bring any claim upon them, for three reasons: in the first
place, because we knew we shouldn't get the money; in the second,
because such a procedure would give so palpable an "object" in people's
eyes for the disturbances at the house that we should, in all
probability, lose the entire confidence of the entire non-spiritualistic
community; thirdly, because I thought it problematical wh