As he grew up his eyes bulged more and more:  his head seemed too large for his rickety body.  He pored over the marvelous volumes until he knew long passages by heart, and understood less of them than his father—­which was unnecessary.  He looked a little like his mother, but while she in her youth had something of the faint and flickering beauty of the Boreal Lights, poor Gershom never could have suggested anything more heavenly than a foggy moonlight.  When he was fifteen he went to the neighboring town of Warsaw to school.  He had rather heavy weather among the well-knit, grubby-knuckled urchins of the town, and would have been thoroughly disheartened but for one happy chance.  At the house where he boarded an amusement called the “Sperrit Rappin’s” was much in vogue.  A group of young folks, surcharged with all sorts of animal magnetism, with some capacity for belief and much more for fun, used to gather about a light pine table every evening, and put it through a complicated course of mystical gymnastics.  It was a very good-tempered table:  it would dance, hop or slam at the word of command, or, if the exercises took a more intellectual turn, it would answer any questions addressed to it in a manner not much below the average capacity of its tormentors.

Gershom Chaney took all this in solemn earnest.  He was from the first moment deeply impressed.  He lay awake whole nights, with his eyes fast closed, in the wildest dreams.  His school-hours were passed in trancelike contemplation.  He cared no more for punishment than the fakeer for his self-inflicted tortures.  He longed for the coming of the day when he could commune in solitude with the unfleshed and immortal.  This was the full flowering of those seeds of fantasy that had fallen into his infant mind as he lay baking his brains by the wide fire in the old stone house at the head of the hollow, while his father read, haltingly, of the wonders of the invisible world.

But, to his great mortification, he saw nothing, heard nothing, experienced nothing but in the company of others.  He must brave the ridicule of the profane to taste the raptures which his soul loved.  His simple, trusting faith made him inevitably the butt of the mischievous circle.  They were not slow in discovering his extreme sensibility to external influences.  One muscular, black-haired, heavy-browed youth took especial delight in practicing upon him.  The table, under Gershom’s tremulous hands, would skip like a lamb at the command of this Thomas Fay.

One evening, Tom Fay had a great triumph.  They had been trying to get the “medium”—­for Gershom had reached that dignity—­to answer sealed questions, and had met with indifferent success.  Fay suddenly approached the table, scribbled a phrase, folded it and tossed it, doubled up, before Gershom; then leaned over the table, staring at his pale, unwholesome face with all the might of his black eyes.

Chaney seized the pencil convulsively and wrote, “Balaam!”