"_Stretch down your hand._"
I put my fingers under the table, and I felt, as indubitably as I ever
felt a touch in my life, the grasp of a _warm, human hand_.
I added to the broken paragraph in the letter to my friend a brief
account of the occurrence, and reiterated my entreaties that he would
come at his earliest convenience to my house. He was an Episcopal
clergyman, by the way, and I considered that his testimony would uphold
my fast-sinking character for veracity among my townspeople. I began to
have an impression that this dilemma in which I found myself was a
pretty serious one for a man of peaceable disposition and honest
intentions to be in.
About this time I undertook to come to a little better understanding
with Miss Fellows. I took her away alone, and having tried my best not
to frighten the life out of her by my grave face, asked her seriously
and kindly to tell me whether she supposed herself to have any
connection with the phenomena in my house. To my surprise she answered
promptly that she thought she had. I repressed a whistle, and "asked for
information."
"The presence of a medium renders easy what would otherwise be
impossible," she replied. "I offered to go away, Mr. Hotchkiss, in the
beginning."
I assured her that I had no desire to have her go away at present, and
begged her to proceed.
"The Influences in the house are strong, as I have said before," she
continued, looking through me and beyond me with her vacant eyes.
"Something is wrong. They are never at rest. I hear them. I feel them. I
see them. They go up and down the stairs with me. I find them in my
room. I see them gliding about. I see them standing now, with their
hands almost upon your shoulders."
I confess to a kind of chill that crept down my backbone at these words,
and to having turned my head and stared hard at the book-cases behind
me.
"But they--I mean something--rapped one night before you came," I
suggested.
"Yes, and they might rap after I was gone. The simple noises are not
uncommon in places where there are no better means of communication. The
extreme methods of expression, such as you have witnessed this winter,
are, I doubt not, practicable only when the system of a medium is
accessible. They write all sorts of messages for you. You would ridicule
them. I do not repeat them. You and Cousin Alison do not see, hear, feel
as I do. We are differently made. There are lying spirits and true, good
spirits and bad. Sometimes the bad deceive and distress me, but
sometimes--sometimes my mother comes."
She lowered her voice reverently, and I was fain to hush the laugh upon
my lips. Whatever the thing might prove to be to me, it was daily
comfort to the nervous, unstrung, lonely woman, whom to suspect of
trickery I began to think was worse than stupidity.
From the time of my midnight experience in the library I allowed myself
to look a little further into the subject of "communications." Miss
Fellows wrote them out at my request whenever they "came" to her.
Writers on Spiritualism have described the process so frequently, that
it is unnecessary for me to dwell upon it at length. The influences took
her unawares in the usual manner. In the usual manner her arm--to all
appearance the passive instrument of some unseen, powerful
agency--jerked and glided over the paper, writing in curious, scrawly
characters, never in her own neat little old-fashioned hand, messages of
which, on coming out from the "trance" state, she would have-no memory;
of many of which at any time she could have had no comprehension. These
messages assumed every variety of character from the tragic to the
ridiculous, and a large portion of them had no point whatever.
One day Benjamin West desired to give me lessons in oil-painting. The
next, my brother Joseph, dead now for ten years, asked forgiveness for
his share in a little quarrel of ours which had embittered a portion of
his last days,--of which, by the way, I am confident that Miss Fellows
knew nothing. At one time I received a long discourse enlightening me on
the arrangement of the "spheres" in the disembodied state of existence.
At another, Alison's dead grandfather pathetically reminded her of a
certain Sunday afternoon at "meetin'" long ago, when the child Allis
hooked his wig off in the long prayer with a bent pin and a piece of
fish-line.
One day we were saddened by the confused wail of a lost spirit, who
represented his agonies as greater than soul could bear, and clamored
for relief. Moved to pity, I inquired:--
"What can we do for you?"