I looked at him through the corner of my eye—­as, doubtless, he had anticipated, for he was glaring with an air of inspired abstraction into the ball of the decanter stopper.  So we sat silent for, I suppose, some ten minutes.  Then I heard him give another deep sigh.  Opening my eyes, I saw him slowly shaking his head.

“De spirits don’t seem communicable dis afternoon,” he muttered, once more tilting the decanter slightly on one side and observing it drearily as before.

I had been rather slow, indeed, in taking the hint, but I determined to take it, and see what would happen.

“Do you think, Your Majesty,” I asked, with as serious a face as I could assume, “the spirits might work better—­if the decanter were to be filled?”

The old man looked at me a little cautiously, as though wondering how to take me.  I tried to keep grave, but I couldn’t quite suppress a twinkle; catching it, he took courage—­seemed to feel that he could trust me.  Slapping his knee, he let himself go in a rush of that deep, chuckling, gurgling, child-like negro laughter which is one of the most appealing gifts of his pathetic race.

“Mebbe, sar; mebbe.  Spirits is curious things; dey need inspiration sometimes, just like ourselves.”

“What kind of inspiration, do you think, gets the best results, Your Majesty?”

“Well, sar, I can’t say as dey is very particular, but I’se noticed dey do seem powerful ’tached to just plain good old Jamaica rum.”

“They shall have it,” I said.

I had noticed that there was a saloon a few yards away, so before many more minutes had passed, I had been there and come back again, and the decanter stood ruddily filled, ready for the resumption of our seance. But before we began, I of course accepted the seer’s invitation to join him and the spirits in a friendly libation.

Then—­I having closed my eyes—­we began again, and it was astonishing with what rapidity the thick-coming pictures began to crowd upon that inner vision with which the Lord had endowed his faithful follower!

Of course, I was inclined now to take the whole thing as an amusing imposture; but presently, watching his face and the curious “seeing” expression of his eyes, and noting the exactitude of one or two of his pictures, I began to feel that, however much he might be inventing or elaborating, there was some substratum of truth in what he was telling me.  I had had sufficient experience of mediums and clairvoyants to know that, except in cases of absolute fraud, there was usually—­beneath a certain amount of conscious “imaginativeness”—­a mysterious gift at work, independent of their volition; something they did see, for which they themselves could not account, and over which they had no control.  And as he proceeded I became more and more convinced that this was the case also with Old King Coffee.