alled Spiritualism will reflect actual observations.
I do not forget that to the advocacy of the "New Dispensation" are
devoted many men of earnestness and a few of ability. It is possible
that the facts they build upon may render mine exceptional and
unimportant. What is here set down is but a trifling contribution to
that mass of human testimony and human opinion from which the truth must
be finally elicited.

Mr. Stellato had been celestially commissioned to Barnum the spirits in
their Foxden exhibitions. Two years previously this gentleman was to be
seen at the head of a fanatical and tumultuary offshoot from a cause the
most humane and noble. He had done whatever his slender abilities
permitted to bring into discredit large-hearted and devoted men and
women whom history will honorably remember as New-England Reformers. But
to lead anything on a large scale, without a continual winding-up by his
companion, the fibrous Mrs. Romulus, was beyond the crassitude of
Stellato's pursy nature. Now it had come to pass that this acidulated
lady, essaying fresh flurries of progression, discovering higher
passional affinities and new duties of demolition, proving that in
Church and State every brick was loose and every timber rotten,
testifying ever to the existence of a certain harmonial mortar by which
the rubbish of a demolished civilization could be rebuilt into
unexceptionable forms,--it happened that this woman, having towered for
one proud moment at the very apex of her mission, slipped suddenly into
the Romish communion, and was no more seen of men. Stellato, perceiving
that the peculiar machinery be had been taught to manage was now out of
repair and impracticable, looked about for some new invention whereby to
gain a livelihood from the credulity of his neighbors. "The spirits,"
then at the height of their profit and renown, were adapted to his
purpose. A blank and vacant mind was freely offered to any power of
earth or air which would condescend to enter and possess it. And so Mr.
Stellato, with his three parts knavery and two parts delusion, became a
popular and successful ghost-monger.

The parsonage had been closed since Charles Clifton terminated his
connection with the parish two years before. The newest lights of the
Liberal persuasion, fledglings from divinity-schools, youths of every
possible variety of creed and no creed, had by turns occupied the vacant
pulpit. The Gospel vibrated at all points between the