‘electric shocks,’ under cover of which the slate is turned and generally placed between his knees, only once I think did he rest it on his knee, and once I think he pressed it against the table; then he reads the question.  And here he shows his nerve.  It is the critical instant of the sitting, it is the only instant when his eyes are not fastened on his sitters, and I confess that his coolness won my admiration.  On one occasion, when the question was written in a back-hand with a very light stroke and close to the upper edge of the slate, he looked at it three several times before he could read it.  Moreover, it was a question out of the common, relating to the species of a hawk and not to a Spirit, and required an intelligent and definite answer.  The hastiness of his reading may be inferred by the frequency with which merely the initials of the Spirit friend are given in the answer.  After reading the question, I noticed that Dr. Slade winks rapidly three or four times in a sort of mental abstraction, I suppose, while thinking out an answer, but he always breathes freer when this crisis is passed, and the violent convulsions are over, which attend his hurried writing and the re-turning of the slate.  His eyes can now be fixed in turn on each of his sitters, and he can rest a minute or two. (One one occasion I saw the slate as he held it between his index and second finger, his index-finger and thumb held the slate pencil.) Presently, the slate is held near to the edge of the table, and a tremulous motion is given to it as though the writing were then going on.

On one occasion, when I knew he was about to use the prepared slate (Professor Thompson will remember what I am about to relate), I suggested that we should use a perfectly fresh pencil, so that we could be sure that that very pencil had done the writing.  I was very curious to know how he would evade the test.  The slate was held close to the under side of the table (the new pencil debarred him from using the double slate); when the writing was finished the slate was slapped violently against the table, and was drawn from underneath it—­apparently with very great difficulty, and almost perpendicularly—­and the little pencil, of course, slipped off, and in the excitement of reading the message from the ‘Summer-land,’ who would think of looking for the pencil?  It was so clever I wanted to applaud him on the spot.

The other tricks, such as tossing the pencil from the slate and playing the accordion, can be perfectly explained and repeated by Mr. Sellers.  Dr. Slade’s fingers are unusually long and strong, and the accordion, which has but four bellows-folds, can be readily manipulated with one hand.