And in the midst of gulls who persistently refuse to be undeceived cheating is so “cruel easy.”  The difficulty is rather that the cheating, even when acknowledged, should ever be credited for what it is.  The medium has confessed!  Yes, and to cheat may be part of the medium nature; none the less he has the medium’s gift of acting as a conductor between the visible and the invisible worlds.  Has he not told secrets of the lives of his wondering clients which could not have been known by natural means?  And Sludge chuckles “could not?”—­could not be known by him who in his seeming passivity is alive at every nerve with the instinct of the detective, by him whose trade was

     Throwing thus
    His sense out, like an ant-eater’s long tongue,
    Soft, innocent, warm, moist, impassible,
    And when ’twas crusted o’er with creatures—­slick,
    Their juice enriched his palate.  “Could not Sludge!”

Haunters of the seance of every species are his aiders and abettors—­the unbeliever, whom believers overwhelm or bribe to acquiescence, the fair votaries who find prurient suggestions characteristic of the genuine medium, the lover of the lie through the natural love of it, the amateur, incapable of a real conviction, who plays safely with superstition, the literary man who welcomes a new flavour for the narrative or the novel, the philosophic diner-out, who wants the chopping-block of a disputable doctrine on which to try the edge of his faculty.  Is it his part, Sludge asks indignantly, to be grateful to the patrons who have corrupted and debased him?

     Gratitude to these? 
    The gratitude, forsooth, of a prostitute
    To the greenhorn and the bully.

The truculence of Sludge is not without warrant; it is indeed no other than the truculence of Robert Browning, “shaking his mane,” as Dante Rossetti described him in his outbreaks against the spiritualists, “with occasional foamings at the mouth."[56]

Where then is the little grain of truth which has vitality amid the putrefaction of Sludge’s nature?  Liar and cheat as he is, he cannot be sure “but there was something in it, tricks and all.”  The spiritual world, he feels, is as real as the material world; the supernatural interpenetrates the natural at every point; in little things, as in great things, God is present.  Sludge is aware of the invisible powers at every nerve: 

    I guess what’s going on outside the veil,
    Just as the prisoned crane feels pairing-time
    In the islands where his kind are, so must fall
    To capering by himself some shiny night
    As if your back yard were a plot of spice.