and tie him.  One of the long-haired ruminant men stood up, and a young fellow, amid much nudging and giggling among the scorners, was also forced from his chair.  They came forward, the believer with a business-like air, which showed practice, and the young skeptic blushing and ill at ease.  Bott took a chair inside the curtain, and showed them how to tie him.  They bound him hand and foot, the believer testified that the binding was solid, and the skeptic went to his seat, playfully stepping upon the toes of his scoffing friends.  The curtain was lowered, and the lamp was turned down.

In a few moments, a scuffling sound was heard in the closet, and Bott’s coat came flying out into the room.  The believer pulled back the curtain, and Botts sat in his chair, his shirt sleeves gleaming white in the dust.  His coat was laid over his shoulders, and almost as soon as the curtain was lowered he yelled for light, and was disclosed sitting tied as before, clothed in his right coat.

Again the curtain went down amid a sigh of satisfaction from the admiring audience, and a choking voice, which tried hard not to sound like Bott’s, cried out from the closet:  “Turn down the light; we want more power.”  The kerosene lamp was screwed down till hardly a spark illumined the visible darkness, and suddenly a fiery hand appeared at the aperture of the closet, slowly opening and shutting its long fingers.

A half dozen voices murmured:  “A spirit hand”; but Sam Sleeny whispered to Maud:  “Them are Bott’s knuckles, for coin.”  The hand was withdrawn and a horrible face took its place—­a pallid corpse-like mask, with lambent fire sporting on the narrow forehead and the high cheek-bones.  It stayed only an instant, but Sam said, “That’s the way Bott will look in——­”

“Hush!” said Maud, who was growing too nervous to smile, for fear of laughing or crying.

A sound of sobbing came from a seat to the right of them.  A poor woman had recognized the face as that of her husband, who had died in the army, and she was drawing the most baleful inferences from its fiery adjuncts.

A moment later, Bott came out of the closet, crouching so low that his head was hardly two feet from the ground.  He had a sheet around his neck, covering his whole person, and a white cap over his head, concealing most of his face.  In this constrained attitude he hopped about the clear space in front of the audience with a good deal of dexterity, talking baby-talk in a shrill falsetto.  “Howdy, pappa!  Howdy, mamma!  Itty Tudie tum adin!”

A rough man and woman, between joy and grief, were half hysterical.  They talked to the toad-like mountebank in the most endearing tones, evidently believing it was their dead baby toddling before them.  Two or three times the same horrible imposture was repeated.  Bott never made his appearance without somebody recognizing him as a dear departed friend.  The glimmering light, the unwholesome excitement, the servile credulity fixed by long habit, seemed to produce a sort of passing dementia upon the regular habitues.