in table-moving, because that may be ‘electricity;’ but you can’t believe in the ‘rapping spirits,’ with the history of whom these movements are undeniably connected, because it’s ‘a jump.’  Well, but you will jump when the time comes for jumping, and when the evidence is strong enough.  I know you; you are strong enough and true enough to jump at anything, without being afraid.  The tables jump, observe—­and you may jump.  Meanwhile, if you were to hear what we heard only the evening before last from a cultivated woman with truthful, tearful eyes, whose sister is a medium, and whose mother believes herself to be in daily communion with her eldest daughter, dead years ago—­if you were to hear what we hear from nearly all the Americans who come to us, their personal experiences, irrespectively of paid mediums, I wonder if you would admit the possibility of your even jumping!  Robert, who won’t believe, he says, till he sees and hears with his own senses—­Robert, who is a sceptic—­observed of himself the other day, that we had received as much evidence of these spirits as of the existence of the town of Washington.  But then of course he would add—­and you would, reasonably enough—­that in a matter of this kind (where you have to jump) you require more evidence, double the evidence, to what you require for the existence of Washington.  That’s true.

[Incomplete]

* * * * *

To Miss E.F.  Haworth

Florence:  June [1853].

My dearest Fanny,—­I hope you will write to me as if I deserved it.  You see, my first word is to avert the consequences of my sin instead of repenting of it in the proper and effectual way.  The truth is, that ever since I received your letter we have been looking out for ‘messengers’ from the Legation, so as to save you postage; while the Embassy people have been regularly forgetting us whenever there has been an opportunity.  By the way, I catch up that word of ‘postage’ to beg you never to think of it when inclined in charity to write to us.  If you knew what a sublunary thing—­oh, far below any visible moon!—­postage is to us exiles!  Too glad we are to get a letter and pay for it.  So write to me directly, dear Fanny, when you think enough of us for that, and write at length, and tell us of yourself first, swirling off into Pope’s circles—­’your country first and then the human race’—­and, indeed, we get little news from home on the subjects which especially interest us.  My sister sends me heaps of near things, but she is not in the magnetic circles, nor in the literary, nor even in the gossiping.  Be good to us, you who stand near the fountains of life!  Every cup of cold water is worth a ducat here.