Of course this assertion applies only to those Spirits who materialized especially for me.  I do not pretend to answer for Spirits who came to other people.  All that I am quite sure of is that all the Spirits who singled me out from the circle, and emerged from the Cabinet for my benefit, were not only abundantly ‘padded round with flesh and fat,’ but also failed utterly in any attempt to establish their individuality; and moreover, in the instances where I had seen the Medium before she entered the Cabinet, so closely resembled the Medium as, in my eyes, to be indistinguishable from her.

It is, I confess, a very puzzling problem (it is, in fact, the problem to which I alluded above) to account for the faith, undoubtedly genuine, which Spiritualists have in the personal reappearance of their departed friends.  Again and again have I asked those who have returned, from an interview with a Spirit at the Cabinet, to their seats beside me, whether or not they had recognized their friends beyond a peradventure, and have always received an affirmative reply, sometimes strongly affirmative.  I was once taken to the Cabinet by a woman and introduced to the Shade of her dead husband.  When we resumed our seats, I could not help asking her:  ‘Are you sure you recognized him?’ Whereupon she instantly retorted, with much indignation, ’Do you mean to imply that I don’t know my husband?’ Again, at another seance, a woman, a visitor, led from the Cabinet to me a Materialized Spirit, whom she introduced to me as ‘her daughter, her dear, darling daughter,’ while nothing could be clearer to me than the features of the Medium in every line and lineament.  Again and again, men have led round the circles the Materialized Spirits of their wives, and introduced them to each visitor in turn; fathers have taken round their daughters, and I have seen widows sob in the arms of their dead husbands.  Testimony, such as this, staggers me.  Have I been smitten with color-blindness?  Before me, as far as I can detect, stands the very Medium herself, in shape, size, form, and feature true to a line, and yet, one after another, honest men and women at my side, within ten minutes of each other, assert that she is the absolute counterpart of their nearest and dearest friends, nay, that she is that friend.  It is as incomprehensible to me as the assertion that the heavens are green, and the leaves of the trees deep blue.  Can it be that the faculty of observation and comparison is rare, and that our features are really vague and misty to our best friends?  Is it that the Medium exercises some mesmeric influence on her visitors, who are thus made to accept the faces which she wills them to see?  Or is it, after all, only the dim light and a fresh illustration of la nuit tous les chats sont gris?  The light, be it remembered, is always dim at these seances, and it is often made especially dim when a Spirit leaves the Cabinet.  I think I have never