It was in this mood that she entered the little apartment where Bott held what he called his “Intermundane Seances.”  The room was small and stuffy.  A simulacrum of a chest of drawers in one corner was really Bott’s bed, where the seer reposed at night, and which, tilted up against the wall during the day, contained the rank bedclothes, long innocent of the wash-tub.  There were a dozen or so of cane-bottom chairs, a little table for a lamp, but no other furniture.  At one side of the room was a small closet without a door, but with a dark and dirty curtain hung before its aperture.  Around it was a wooden railing, breast high.

A boy with a high forehead, and hair combed behind ears large and flaring like those of a rabbit, sat by the door, and took the tickets of invited guests and the half-dollars of the casuals.  The seer received everybody with a nerveless shake of a clammy hand, showed them to seats, and exchanged a word or two about the weather, and the “conditions,” favorable or otherwise, to spiritual activity.  When he saw Maud and Sam his tallowy face flushed, in spots, with delight.  He took them to the best places the room afforded, and stammered his pleasure that they had come.

“Oh! the pleasure is all ours,” said Maud, who was always self-possessed when she saw men stammering.  “It’s a great privilege to get so near to the truth as you bring us, Mr. Bott.”

The prophet had no answer ready; he merely flushed again in spots, and some new arrivals called him away.

The room was now pretty well filled with the unmistakable crowd which always attend such meetings.  They were mostly artisans, of more intellectual ambition than their fellows, whose love of the marvellous was not held in control by any educated judgment.  They had long, serious faces, and every man of them wore long hair and a soft hat.  Their women were generally sad, broken-spirited drudges, to whom this kind of show was like an opera or a ball.  There were two or three shame-faced believers of the better class, who scoffed a little but trembled in secret, and a few avowed skeptics, young clerks on a mild spree, ready for fun if any should present itself.

Bott stepped inside the railing by the closet, and placing his hands upon it, addressed the assembly.  He did not know what peculiar shape the manifestations of the evening might take.  They were in search of truth; all truth was good.  They hoped for visitors from the unseen speers; he could promise nothing.  In this very room the spirits of the departed had walked and talked with their friends; perhaps they might do it again; he knew not.  How they mingled in the earth-life, he did not pretend to say; perhaps they materialized through the mejum; perhaps they dematerialized material from the audience which they rematerialized in visible forms; as to that, the opinion of another—­he said with a spacious magnanimity—­was as good as his.  He would now request two of the audience to step up