The catastrophe came sooner than I had anticipated, and partly through my own instrumentality; though, in any case, it must finally have come.  We were met together at the house of one of the most zealous and fanatical believers.  There were but eight persons present,—­the host and his wife, (an equally zealous proselyte,) a middle-aged bachelor neighbor, Mr. and Mrs. Stilton, Miss Fetters and her father, and myself.  It was a still, cloudy, sultry evening, after one of those dull, oppressive days when all the bad blood in a man seems to be uppermost in his veins.  The manifestations upon the table, with which we commenced, were unusually rapid and lively.  “I am convinced,” said Mr. Stilton, “that we shall receive important revelations to-night.  My own mind possesses a clearness and quickness, which, I have noticed, always precede the visit of a superior spirit.  Let us be passive and receptive, my friends.  We are but instruments in the hands of loftier intelligences, and only through our obedience can this second advent of Truth be fulfilled.”

He looked at me with that expression which I so well knew, as the signal for a surrender of my will.  I had come rather unwillingly, for I was getting heartily tired of the business, and longed to shake off my habit of (spiritual) intoxication, which no longer possessed any attraction, since I had been allowed to visit Agnes as an accepted lover.  In fact, I continued to hold my place in the circle principally for the sake of satisfying myself with regard to the real nature and causes of the phenomena.  On this night, something in Mr. Stilton’s face arrested my attention, and a rapid inspiration flashed through my mind.  “Suppose,” I thought, “I allow the usual effect to be produced, yet reverse the character of its operation?  I am convinced that he has been directing the current of my thought according to his will; let me now render myself so thoroughly passive, that my mind, like a mirror, shall reflect what passes through his, retaining nothing of my own except the simple consciousness of what I am doing.”  Perhaps this was exactly what he desired.  He sat, bending forward a little over the table, his square jaws firmly set, his eyes hidden beneath their heavy brows, and every long, wiry hair on his head in its proper place.  I fixed my eyes upon him, threw my mind into a state of perfect receptivity, and waited.

It was not long before I felt his approach.  Shadow after shadow flitted across the still mirror of my inward sense.  Whether the thoughts took words in his brain or in mine,—­whether I first caught his disjointed musings, and, by their utterance reacting upon him, gave system and development to his thoughts,—­I cannot tell.  But this I know:  what I said came wholly from him,—­not from the slandered spirits of the dead, not from the vagaries of my own imagination, but from him.  “Listen to me!” I said.  “In the flesh I was a martyr to the Truth, and I am permitted to communicate only