her lecture, says the correspondent, after a
beautiful and eloquent prayer, Miss Jay sang
(still in a state of trance?). Her voice was
wonderfully clear and sweet. She confined
herself to no words nor tune, but sang in a
sort of inspiration, ranging from an alto tone
as high as B flat. Of course this brought
down thunders of applause, by which the
lady tastefully attired in the black silk skirt
could be awakened from her trance in time
to make her obeisance to the public

Will our readers bear with us a little longer.
We are ourselves beginning to grow tired of
this humiliating nonsense, and must forbear
from telling the whole story, the doings of
Natty Putnam, whose true name was Young,
and who was indeed the youngest of physicians,
having been only five days old when he
died. But he would now be, if he had not
died, thirty-five or forty years of age. It is
his pleasure to present himself as an infant in
size, though he gives evidence of having an
old head on his young shoulders. This young
doctor prescribed some medicines to Mrs.
Sisson for a person unknown to her, and by a
series of miracles, the person for whom they
were meant was discovered; Mrs. S. being
led by the spirit to ring his bell five minutes
before the dinner-hour and enter, medicine
in hand, to dine with him. The affair, which
is very complicated, must have cost the spirits
an infinity of trouble, and, after all, the recipient
of the celestial dose cannot say that he
is much the better for it. He only states (we
use his own italics) that the effects of the
remedies have not been bad; for I and my
wife are both in better health than when we
began to take them; the case, however, is
described much less for the purpose of showing
the value of the medicines than for furnishing
evidence of the fact that there was
an invisible physician.

Then, again, there are more than three
columns occupied by the experience of Doctor
Phelps, in whose bedroom a sheet was
spread out upon the floor, the washstand laid
upon its back upon the sheet, a candlestick
set upon the stand, the wash-bowl placed
upon one side, and the pitcher upon the other.
A nightgown and chemise were found, one in
the bowl, the other in the pitcher. We
suspect that must have been done by the
spirit of some officer lately belonging to the
gallant Forty-fifth, or lodged in Canterbury
barracks. Pitchers of water were poured by
the same spirit into the doctor's bed. His
windows were broken. His umbrella, standing
at the end of the hall, leaped without
visible assistance, a distance of at least twenty-five
feet; a book leapt from his shelf into the
middle of the room, and at the breakfast
table, on one occasion, a remarkably large
raw potatoe fell directly by the side of Doctor
P.'s plate. The doctor thereupon, being a
scientific man, took up the potatoe and let it
fall from different heights, in order to determine
how far it must have fallen to have
made the concussion that it did; and it was
adjudged by all that the distance could not
have been more than twelve or fifteen inches.
So it must have dropped from just under the
doctor's nose.

We have not patience to write more of this
foolery, with which we are told that in America
two millions of mouths are gaping to be
fed. Even as nonsense, it is scarcely to be
heard patiently by any man—except a
rogue who has the dullest glimmering of
reason in his brains. We shall cite only one
thing more. In his first leading article in
each of the two papers before us, the editor
of the New England Spiritualist endeavours
to account for the extreme stupidity and prosiness
of the spirits of great wits, philosophers,
and poets, to show how it is that Shakespeare,
seen through a rapping medium, is the
same dull dog as the medium himself. He
explains this by telling us that lofty ideas and
refined conceptions cannot be apprehended by
infantile and undeveloped minds. Can you,
he asks, pour the magnificent tones of a
cathedral organ through a simple fife? For
Sir Francis Bacon to exhibit himself now,
equal to what he was in the body (to say
nothing at all of what he may now be in the
spirit) would require a medium of physical and
mental endowments equal to those which
Bacon then possessed—and such are very
rare. Mediums with the wit of a Bacon in
them certainly are rare; and if we must have
a medium who is a Bacon of our own times to
speak for the Bacon of our forefathers, and a
new Shakespeare to speak for the old one,
surely we think it can need no ghost at all to
tell them what they ought to say.

           A VISION OF HOURS.

    When the bright stars came out last night,
     And the dew lay on the flowers,
    I had a vision of delight—
     A dream of by-gone hours.

    Those hours that came and fled so fast
     Of pleasure or of pain,
    As phantoms rose from out the past
     Before my eyes again.
    With beating heart did I behold
     A train of joyous hours,
    Lit with the radiant light of old,
     And, smiling, crown'd with flowers.

    And some were hours of childish sorrow,
      A mimicry of pain,
     That through their tears look'd for a morrow
       They knew must smile again.

    Those hours of hope that long'd for life,
      And wish'd their part begun,
    And e'er the summons to the strife,
      Dream'd that the field was won.

    I knew the echo of their voice,
     The starry crowns they wore;
    The vision made my soul rejoice
      With the old thrill of yore.