afraid she was a bad lot.’  ’Indeed she was!’ (with great emphasis).  ‘What cruel eyes she had!’ ’Hadn’t she, though!’ ‘How did she find you out?’ ‘I haven’t an idea.’  ’Ah, Fair Rosamund, do you remember how beautiful you were [here the Spirit simpered a little] after you were dead, and how the people came from far and near to look at you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Fair Rosamund, ’I looked down on them all the while.’  And here she glided back into the Cabinet.

It is not impossible that a Spiritualist might urge that the test which I apply is not a fair one—­that guile will beget guile, that the Spirits meet me as I meet them.

But what other possible way have I of finding out who the Spirits are, when they do not tell me in advance, but by asking them?  Whenever they have been announced to me as this or that Spirit, I invariably treat them as the Spirits of those whom they assert themselves to be, and, in my conclusions, am guided only by the pertinency of their answers to my questions.  Whenever William Shakespeare appears to me (and, by the way, let me here parenthetically note, as throwing light on a vexed question, that Shakespeare in the Spirit-world ‘favors’ the Chandos Portrait, even to the two little white collar strings hanging down in front; his Spirit has visited me several times, and such was his garb when I saw him most distinctly); when, I repeat, Shakespeare materializes in the Cabinet for me, do I not always most reverently salute him, and does he not graciously nod to me—­until I venture most humbly to ask him what the misprint, ‘Vllorxa’ in Timon of Athens stands for, when he always slams the curtains in my face? (I meekly own that perhaps he is justified.) Have I ever failed in respectful homage to General Washington?  Did I ever evince the slightest mistrust of Indian ‘braves?’

When a Spirit comes out of the Cabinet especially to me, how am I to know, or to find out, who it is but by asking?  If it be not the Spirit that I name, will it not, if it has a shred of honesty, set me right?  What hinders it from telling me just who it is?  If it be the Spirit of my great-grandmother, it can be surely no satisfaction to her, after all the bother of materialization, to hold converse with me as the Spirit of Sally in our Alley; and if she be, in every sense of the word, a ‘spirity’ old lady, she will instantly undeceive me, and ’let me know who I am talking to.’  But why should I anticipate deceit at Spiritual hands?  If William Shakespeare can appear to me, why not Fair Rosamund?  Hereupon a Spiritualist may maintain that if the Spirit said she was Fair Rosamund, and displayed a familiarity with the incidents of that frail woman’s life and death, she probably was Fair Rosamund.  So be it.  I yield, and will go farther, and hereafter find no more difficulty, than in her case, in Tennyson’s Olivia, Marie St. Clair, and in the heroes and heroines of Scheherezade’s Thousand and One Nights.