Pliant to his gesture (which had even an obsequious courtesy, but at the same time a remarkable decisiveness), the figure placed itself in the great chair.  Sitting there, in such visible obscurity, it was, perhaps, as much like the actual presence of a disembodied spirit as anything that stage trickery could devise.  The hushed breathing of the spectators proved how high-wrought were their anticipations of the wonders to be performed through the medium of this incomprehensible creature.  I, too, was in breathless suspense, but with a far different presentiment of some strange event at hand.

“You see before you the Veiled Lady, said the bearded Professor, advancing to the verge of the platform.  “By the agency of which I have just spoken, she is at this moment in communion with the spiritual world.  That silvery veil is, in one sense, an enchantment, having been dipped, as it were, and essentially imbued, through the potency of my art, with the fluid medium of spirits.  Slight and ethereal as it seems, the limitations of time and space have no existence within its folds.  This hall—­these hundreds of faces, encompassing her within so narrow an amphitheatre—­are of thinner substance, in her view, than the airiest vapor that the clouds are made of.  She beholds the Absolute!”

As preliminary to other and far more wonderful psychological experiments, the exhibitor suggested that some of his auditors should endeavor to make the Veiled Lady sensible of their presence by such methods—­provided only no touch were laid upon her person—­as they might deem best adapted to that end.  Accordingly, several deep-lunged country fellows, who looked as if they might have blown the apparition away with a breath, ascended the platform.  Mutually encouraging one another, they shouted so close to her ear that the veil stirred like a wreath of vanishing mist; they smote upon the floor with bludgeons; they perpetrated so hideous a clamor, that methought it might have reached, at least, a little way into the eternal sphere.  Finally, with the assent of the Professor, they laid hold of the great chair, and were startled, apparently, to find it soar upward, as if lighter than the air through which it rose.  But the Veiled Lady remained

seated and motionless, with a composure that was hardly less than awful, because implying so immeasurable a distance betwixt her and these rude persecutors.

“These efforts are wholly without avail,” observed the Professor, who had been looking on with an aspect of serene indifference.  “The roar of a battery of cannon would be inaudible to the Veiled Lady.  And yet, were I to will it, sitting in this very hall, she could hear the desert wind sweeping over the sands as far off as Arabia; the icebergs grinding one against the other in the polar seas; the rustle of a leaf in an East Indian forest; the lowest whispered breath of the bashfullest maiden in the world, uttering the first confession of her love.  Nor does there exist the moral inducement, apart from my own behest, that could persuade her to lift the silvery veil, or arise out of that chair.”