For two or three years, I must admit, my life was a very happy one.  Not only were those occasional trances an intoxication, nay, a coveted indulgence, but they cast a consecration over my life.  My restored faith rested on the sure evidence of my own experience; my new creed contained no harsh or repulsive feature; I heard the same noble sentiments which I uttered in such moments repeated by my associates in the faith, and I devoutly believed that a complete regeneration of the human race was at hand.  Nevertheless, it struck me sometimes as singular that many of the Mediums whom I met—­men and women chosen by spiritual hands to the same high office—­excited in my mind that instinct of repulsion on which I had learned to rely as a sufficient reason for avoiding certain persons.  Far as it would have been from my mind, at that time, to question the manifestations which accompanied them, I could not smother my mistrust of their characters.  Miss Fetters, whom I so frequently met, was one of the most disagreeable.  Her cold, thin lips, pale eyes, and lean figure gave me a singular impression of voracious hunger.  Her presence was often announced to me by a chill shudder, before I saw her.  Centuries ago one of her ancestors must have been a ghoul or vampire.  The trance of possession seemed, with her, to be a form of dissipation, in which she indulged as she might have catered for a baser appetite.  The new religion was nothing to her; I believe she valued it only on account of the importance she obtained among its followers.  Her father, a vain, weak-minded man, who kept a grocery in the town, was himself a convert.

Stilton had an answer for every doubt.  No matter how tangled a labyrinth might be exhibited to him, he walked straight through it.

“How is it,” I asked him, “that so many of my fellow-mediums inspire me with an instinctive dislike and mistrust?”

“By mistrust you mean dislike,” he answered; “since you know of no reason to doubt their characters.  The elements of soul-matter are differently combined in different individuals, and there are affinities and repulsions, just as there are in the chemical elements.  Your feeling is chemical, not moral.  A want of affinity does not necessarily imply an existing evil in the other party.  In the present ignorance of the world, our true affinities can only he imperfectly felt and indulged; and the entire freedom which we shall obtain in this respect is the greatest happiness of the spirit-life.”

Another time I asked,—­

“How is it that the spirits of great authors speak so tamely to us?  Shakspeare, last night, wrote a passage which he would have been heartily ashamed of, as a living man.  We know that a spirit spoke, calling himself Shakspeare; but, judging from his communication, it could not have been he.”