Marie St. Clair.’

14 May, ’85.

After I had handed this last question to Dr. Mansfield a slight incident enabled me, to my own satisfaction, to note the exact instant when he read my question (he would say, ‘clairvoyantly’) behind his row of books.  He once lifted his eyes to mine, and met them full for an instant in a piercing look.  I do not think he suspected that I was his former correspondent (I would have told him willingly who I was if he had ever asked me), but the name ‘Dina Melish’ seemed to come back to his memory, as one that he had heard but could not localize.  Of course I knew that he had just read my question.

I told him that these were all the questions I desired to ask him.  He exhorted me to be calm, and told me a cheerful story of a young girl’s having been recently buried alive, of which, I infer, the moral was, that she would have found it more comfortable all round to have been sold to the doctors.  I paid him his fee and left.

In conclusion, let me add that we have by no means exhausted the lessons which Spiritualism, in the hands of some of its votaries, can teach us.  To our purblind vision the joint ownership of one skull by two different persons presents a physiological problem more or less difficult of solution.  But all difficulty vanishes as soon as ‘the river is crossed.’  I derived no little comfort and much light from a Materializing Seance which I attended shortly afterwards in Boston, where both Marie St. Clair and Sister Belle appeared together, at the same time, and greeted me with affectionate warmth.  To my inexpressible relief they were each well provided with skulls.  They were more mature and matronly, I confess, than my ardent fancy had painted them, and Sister Belle’s ‘golden curls one yard long’ were changed to very straight black hair; the golden hue which Sister Belle had herself ascribed to them must have been due to the light in which she saw them, ’the light that never was on sea or land.’

I was pleased to find that Marie’s English was excellent, without a trace of foreign accent.  But this, and the matronly appearance, I learned subsequently were presumably due to the age, shape and nativity of the Medium through whom she materialized.  For when Marie afterwards appeared to me, as she did many times at another Medium’s seances, her appearance was quite youthful, with clustering brown curls low down on her forehead, which when I once attempted to stroke I found to be full of sharp pins; and to my expressions of gratitude that she should so kindly appear to me, she lisped in broken English:  ’I am viz you olvays.’  The present of an amber necklace, with the name ‘Marie’ engraved on the silver clasp, obtained for me from her the written expression of her pleasure that I had carefully preserved what I assured her was ‘the last thing on her neck before she passed over.’  Need I say that this document, in Marie’s own handwriting, invests the skull with even added interest?