to regard the proceedings in a charitable spirit.
Surely, I thought to myself, this man must
believe what he is saying. As I enter the room,
I catch the words "through Jesus Christ our
Lord," and Home is reverently bowing his head.
I sat down with a feeling that I was at church,
fully prepared to yield myself to the force of
any wholesome influence that might be brought
to bear upon me.

I will relate briefly what I heard and saw,
and what was the impression left upon my
mind.

As Mr. Home takes credit for being a
medium, with extraordinary powers of body and
mind, he can scarcely object to a description of
his person. He is a tall, thin man, with broad,
square shoulders, suggestive of a suit of clothes
hung upon an iron cross. His hair is long and
yellow; his teeth are large, glittering, and
sharp; his eyes are a pale grey, with a redness
about the eyelids, which comes and goes in a
ghostly manner as he talks. When he shows
his glittering, sharp teeth, and that red rim
comes round his slowly rolling eyes, he is not a
pleasant sight to look upon. His hands were long,
white, and bony, and you knew, without touching
them, that they were icy cold. He stooped
over his paper, and rarely looked up, except to
turn his eyes towards heaven in an appeal to
the Deity. The first part of the lecture was
very dull and heavy, being all about the
indestructibility of matter. Before this "head" was
exhausted I counted fifteen members of the
congregation who were fast asleep. After my
experience at the pay-place it was rather startling
to hear Mr. Home disclaiming all mercenary
motives, and declaring that he had never
received, and never would receive, money for his
work. In a private circular to his friends he
says, "I need not tell you how important it is
to me to have the support of my friends, not
only as a comfort and encouragement to me,
but as essentially aiding the cause in which they
and I are deeply interested. Much, indeed, of
my own fortune must depend on the issue of this
experiment." I leave the reader to reconcile
this appeal with his disavowal of mercenary
motives how he or she can.

Mr. Home then proceeded to show that spiritualism
was no new doctrine, but had existed
for ages. Tables were used for eliciting
responses from spirits fifteen centuries ago, and
some of the best and greatest of men in all ages
had been spiritualists. Among the number he
mentioned Wesley, Baxter, Swedenborg, Luther,
and Judge Edmunds of New York. To prove
the possibility of the visions which had appeared
to himself, he instanced the dreams, visions, and
apparitions which are recorded in the Bible.
Angels appeared to Moses, Balaam, and Gideon,
a spirit passed before Job, an apparition appeared
to Saul, Christ was transfigured. Why should
not he, Mr. H., see such things, and be lifted
up to the ceiling of a room in the presence of
his disciples? It was a contradiction to deny
the truth of spirit-rapping, when every Sunday
in church we declared our belief in the
communion of saints. Such was the
argument.

Then we had the statistics of modern
spiritualism. There were five hundred public
mediums, fifty thousand private ones, and
millions of believers. In France, Spain,
Holland, Belgium, and other countries on the
Continent, it had made great progress. The
work had been slower in England, but it had
borne fruit among the literary and educated
classes, and many persons of the highest
distinction were its avowed advocates. He next
proceeded to relate his own experiences. The gift
of mediumship had been in his family for four
generations, and the possessor of it had
generally been a delicate person and had died young.
His (Mr. H.'s) cradle had been rocked by unseen
hands, and at three years of age he had a vision,
in which he saw his little cousin dying, though he
resided many miles away. When his mother
died, a rapping was beard on the table. His aunt,
thinking that it was done by young Daniel, threw
a chair at him, and accused him of being an imp
of the devil. The good lady thought to lay
the evil spirit by placing the Bible on the table
and leaning upon it; but table, Bible, aunt and
all, were lifted into the air. Two years ago,
in looking into a crystal ball, at Dieppe, he
saw an excited crowd and a man being
assassinated. He exclaimed, "That is Abraham
Lincoln," and several months afterwards the
vision was verified. He also asserted that he
had been lifted up to the ceiling of a brightly-
lighted room, in the presence of several
spectators. All these wonderful stories he told
with perfect earnestness, and it was evident
that the majority of his audience implicitly
believed every word he said. I could not
resist a short incredulous laugh now and then,
and every time I uttered it a score of scowling
eyes were turned upon me, as if I had been a
bad boy misbehaving myself before the clergyman
in the pulpit.

When Mr. Home was in the middle of his
statistics, Professor Anderson, the conjuror,
rose from a back seat and said, "That is wrong."
Said Mr. Home, "When I have finished my
lecture, I will hear what you have to say."
Accordingly, when the lecture was finished, the
Professor walked up the room, ascended the
platform, and began deliberately to take off his
coat. Mr. Home, not liking the look of this
proceeding, immediately hopped down from the
platform and began distributing bills among his
friends. But the conjuror had no intention of
challenging Mr. Home to fisticuffs. He had
merely taken off his great-coat to give fuller
play to his lungs in a meditated effort of
oratory. But the congregation declined to listen
to him. His first word was drowned in hisses
and cries of "Off, off." He tried again and again
to obtain a hearing, but in vain; and shouting at
the top of his voice "Swindle! humbug!
blasphemy!" &c., the conjuror was obliged to
resume his coat and descend. He had not one
friend in the room.

Mr. Home was on the most intimate terms