The same child, refreshed into an abnormal ecstasy, taking the hands of several of our party professed to read their thoughts, with admitted success in some instances.  With me she failed, but then I was not considered en rapport.  Female believers are always much more susceptible than masculine sceptics.  However, I certainly had proof of the child’s marvellous power in this slight matter following.  Two young ladies had successfully brought her in spirit, into their mother’s drawing-room in Berkeley Square, the child graphically explaining all she saw as she was mentally led along, and on being asked if she noticed anything new and pretty on the mantel-piece, she got up and placed herself in an attitude of dancing, and she said there was a figure and it was clothed in lace.  This was true; it was a bisque statuette of Taglioni.  On being led round the room, still in spirit and clairvoyante, the child strangely described wax-flowers under a glass, and laughed heartily at “Taffy riding his goat,”—­a china ornament which she could have known nothing of.

With respect to the lady who invited us, I can relate a strange story wherewith the Brighton doctors in 1848 were familiar.  Mrs. P. had an invalid daughter subject to violent headaches, and as she had read of the remedial powers of mesmerism from Chauncey Townsend’s book, privately resolved to try and cure her, and soon set her to sleep by the usual “passes.”  However, when after twelve and even eighteen hours the girl could not be awakened, Mrs. P. and her husband (a clergyman, who knew nothing of the cause) were alarmed and summoned doctor after doctor, to wake her, if they could.  But all was in vain, until some one turning to the peccant and magical volume found that by the simple process of reversing the passes the abnormal slumber might be made to cease.  This was done at once, and all came more than right, for the girl woke up without her usual headache, and was cured from that hour.  At this time of day, after thirty years and more, society having become wiser, and bur medical men more physiologically hygienic, we all now wot of mesmerism, and innumerable cases of cure through that mysterious form of catalepsy.

For another small experience, I have several times been among a crowd of others at public exhibitions of those who speak off-hand in prose or verse, “inspirationally” as they call it, but as the outer world prefer to believe, improvisatorially, and certainly amid such gifted persons Mrs. Cora Tappan stands out prominently in my memory.  At the Brighton Pavilion I gave her for a theme to be versified on the spot extempore my own heraldic motto, “L’espoir est ma force,” and to my astonishment, in a burst of rhymed eloquence she rolled off at least a dozen four-line stanzas on Hope and its spiritual power.  Some one else among the audience gave the subject of cremation, and forthwith the lady descanted with terrific force on funeral pyres and the horrors of Gehenna; whilst