These investigations were not regularly carried on.  Occasionally the interest of the circle flagged, until it was renewed by the visit of some apostle of the new faith, usually accompanied by a “Preaching Medium.”  Among those whose presence especially conduced to keep alive the flame of spiritual inquiry was a gentleman named Stilton, the editor of a small monthly periodical entitled “Revelations from the Interior.”  Without being himself a Medium, he was nevertheless thoroughly conversant with the various phenomena of Spiritualism, and both spoke and wrote in the dialect which its followers adopted.  He was a man of varied, but not profound learning, an active intellect, giving and receiving impressions with equal facility, and with an unusual combination of concentrativeness and versatility in his nature.  A certain inspiration was connected with his presence.  His personality overflowed upon and influenced others.  “My mind is not sufficiently submissive,” he would say, “to receive impressions from the spirits, but my atmosphere attracts them and encourages them to speak.”  He was a stout, strongly built man, with coarse black hair, gray eyes, large animal mouth, square jaws, and short, thick neck.  Had his hair been cropped close, he would have looked very much like a prize-fighter; but he wore it long, parted in the middle, and as meek in expression as its stiff waves would allow.

Stilton soon became the controlling spirit of our circle.  His presence really seemed, as he said, to encourage the spirits.  Never before had the manifestations been so abundant or so surprising.  Miss Fetters, especially, astonished us by the vigor of her possessions.  Not only Samson and Peter the Great, but Gibbs the Pirate, Black Hawk, and Joe Manton, who had died the previous year in a fit of delirium-tremens, prophesied, strode, swore, and smashed things in turn, by means of her frail little body.  As Cribb, a noted pugilist of the last century, she floored an incautious spectator, giving him a black eye which he wore for a fortnight afterwards.  Singularly enough, my visitors were of the opposite cast.  Hypatia, Petrarch, Mary Magdalen, Abelard, and, oftenest of all, Shelley, proclaimed mystic truths from my lips.  They usually spoke in inspired monologues, without announcing themselves beforehand, and often without giving any clue to their personality.  A practised stenographer, engaged by Mr. Stilton, took down many of these communications as they were spoken, and they were afterwards published in the “Revelations.”  It was also remarked, that, while Miss Fetters employed violent gestures and seemed to possess a superhuman strength, I, on the contrary, sat motionless, pale, and with little sign of life except in my voice, which, though low, was clear and dramatic in its modulations.  Stilton explained this difference without hesitation.  “Miss Abby,” he said, “possesses soul-matter of a texture to which the souls of these strong men naturally adhere.  In the spirit-land the superfluities repel each other; the individual souls seek to remedy their imperfections:  in the union of opposites only is to be found the great harmonia of life.  You, John, move upon another plane; through what in you is undeveloped, these developed spirits are attracted.”