gazed at the word, and Beulah
spelled correctly C-H-I-C-A-G, but made eight wrong efforts before she
found the closing O. In other cases, she did not notice that the word
was completed, and was trying to fish up still other letters from her
mind. Everything showed that the word as a word did not come to her
mind, but only the single letters. I leave entirely out of
consideration the marvels of mind-reading which were secured by the
judge and the minister, the male and female newspaper reporters,
before I took charge of the study of the case. I rely only on what I
saw and of which I took exact notes. I wrote down every wrong letter
and every wrong figure, and base my calculation only on this entirely
reliable material. Nevertheless, I must acknowledge it as a fact
beyond doubt that such results as I got regularly could never possibly
have been secured by mere coincidence and chance. As chance and fraud
are thus equally out of the question, we are obliged to seek for
another explanation.

There is one explanation which offers itself most readily: We saw that
in order to succeed, some one around her, preferably the mother and
sister, who stand nearest to her heart, have to know the words or the
cards. Those visual images must be in some one's mind, and she has the
unusual power of being able to read what is in the minds of those
others. Such an explanation even seems to some a very modest claim,
almost a kind of critical and skeptical view. The judge and the
minister, for instance, in accepting this idea of her mind-reading,
felt conservative, as through it they disclaimed any belief in
mysterious clairvoyance and telepathic powers. In the newspaper
stories, where the mysteries grew with the geographical distance from
Rhode Island, Beulah was said to be able to tell names or dates or
facts which no one present knew. It was asserted that she could give
the dates on the coins which any one had in his pocket without the
possessor himself knowing them, or that she could give a word in a
book on which some one was holding his finger without reading it. No
wonder that the public felt sure that she could just as well discover
secrets which no one knows and be aware of far-distant happenings. It
is only one step from this to the belief in a prophetic foresight of
what is to come. For most unthinking people, mind-reading leads in
this fashion over to the whole world of mysticism. In sharp contrast
to such vagaries, the critical ob