the streets not only
fire-tongs and walking-sticks, but other portable property belonging to
my friends.

Perhaps my excitement had a bad effect on the medium. She was uneasy
and complained that the threads that bound her arms were tight. She was
distinctly fretful. But after a time she settled down in her chair.
Her figure, a deeper shadow in the semi-darkness of the room, seemed
sagged--seemed, in some indefinable way, smaller. But there was none of
the stertorous breathing that preceded trance.

Then, suddenly, a bell that Sperry had placed on the stand beyond
the black curtain commenced to ring. It rang at first gently, then
violently. It made a hideous clamor. I had a curious sense that it was
ringing up in the air, near the top of the curtain. It was a relief to
have it thrown to the ground, its racket silenced.

Quite without warning, immediately after, my chair twisted under me. "I
am being turned around," I said, in a low tone. "It as if something has
taken hold of the back of the chair, and is twisting it. It has stopped
now." I had been turned fully a quarter round.

For five minutes, by the luminous dial of my watch on the table before
me, nothing further occurred, except that the black curtain appeared to
swell, as in a wind.

"There is something behind it," Alice Robinson said, in a terrorized
tone. "Something behind it, moving."

"It is not possible," Herbert assured her. "Nothing, that is--there is
only one door, and it is closed. I have examined the walls and floor
carefully."

At the end of five minutes something soft and fragrant fell on to the
table near me. I had not noticed Herbert when he placed the flowers from
Mrs. Dane's table on the stand, and I was more startled than the others.
Then the glass prisms in the chandelier over our heads clinked together,
as if they had been swept by a finger. More of the flowers came. We were
pelted with them. And into the quiet that followed there came a light,
fine but steady tattoo on the table in our midst. Then at last silence,
and the medium in deep trance, and Mrs. Dane rapping on the floor for
Clara.

When Clara came in, Mrs. Dane told her to switch on the lights. Miss
Jeremy had dropped in her chair until the silk across her chest was held
taut. But investigation showed that none of the threads were broken and
that her evening slippers still fitted into the outline on the paper
beneath them. Without getting up, Sperry reached to the stand behin