the Buffalo doctors. Try it yourselves, dear readers. Under the right conditions, I can sit and call the letters for hours together, and when the message is finished it will be found to be perfect and unbroken from beginning to end-in accordance with the intelligence of the Spirit, not that of the medium.

I have seen Spirits walk around the room, furnishing their own light sufficiently bright to show themselves distinctly to all persons present, when every precaution had been taken to lock and seal the doors and windows, to prevent ingress or egress of any person to disturb the circle; and I know hundreds, still living, who can testify to this

statement.

Now, then, why should there be any need of so conducting circles for manifestations as to cause suspicion, or leave the minds of investigators in doubt? Should a medium be allowed to enter a cabinet without any precautions on the part of the sitters to require "test conditions," and deliberately clothe him or herself in the habiliments of angels, and then softly glide forth into a dimly lighted room, scarcely visible to the eye, and call it a "materialization" or a "transfiguration"?. Shame on such cruel deception. I am astonished that people are willing to be so imposed upon. When I was before the public, I expected and wished to give every satisfaction in my power. I believe all persons who wish to know the truth, and are willing to pay mediums for their time and trouble, should demand their rights, search the cabinets, and hold the mediums by joining hands until they are fully satisfied of the truthfulness of the manifestations. We have never objected to being held, and we have even submitted to being stetho scoped and gagged to settle the question of ventriloquism, after every other test had been applied.

I do not wish to be understood as condemning all cabi

net séances. We, for our part, never used cabinets nor had occasion to do so. I know, through the best of testimony, that with honest mediums and select confidential circles, marvellous phenomena have taken place through that means since my day. But I do disapprove of such séances before promiscuous parties, when not accompanied with precautions against the possibility of deception; for when "test conditions" are not required by the sitters, or insisted upon by the mediums as their only protection against malevolent suspicions, they open the door to fraudulent mediums for the practice of abominable deceptions.

Nor will I dismiss the subject without cautioning all against the error of always relying implicitly upon the communications of those whom they regard as Spirits far better, higher, and more enlightened than themselves or their friends. Still less should they, necessarily, obey their directions or counsels, especially in regard to their business or social concerns.

Many investigators find it hard to divest themselves of a sort of superstitious reverence for the Spirits in conversation with them. It is a mistake to suppose them to know everything, and a greater one to imagine them capable of doing everything. It is sometimes an error even to believe them to be the Spirits they profess to be. Spirits are of many varieties of condition, character, and degrees of progress. There are those prone to amuse themselves with a sort of practical joking and false personation; and such Spirits, being in a low plane, are apt to be glad of any opportunity to push themselves forward into the door opened by the presence of the medium, and play their fantastic tricks on the too credulous. We must judge for ourselves of the reasonableness, the probability, and the characteristic resemblance of what Spirits may say, to that which we might have expected from them. We must

strive, by our daily lives and conversation, to attract to ourselves only Spirits of the better and higher orders in that world of the next life, which is far more densely populous than the one in which we ourselves still "live and move and have our being."

At the same time I think that the cause of Spiritualism would be at this day further advanced in general acceptance, if cabinets, and with them the phenomena called materialization and transfiguration, had never been introduced. For, however genuine, as well as impressive, may be the manifestations of the presence and action of the Spirits which may have occurred in the employment of them, they afford opportunities for deception which dishonest mediums are but too ready to avail themselves of, and then when exposure comes (and it is generally Spiritualists who are the most earnest in detecting and punishing the infamy of such deception), they are at once trumpeted all over the land, and more harm is done to the progress of the cause than all the good ever resulting from the genuine phenomena themselves. No such exposures ever occurred in all our long and varied experience, though never have mediums been subjected to more jealous and severe investigations; and there are few of the more modern phenomena which have not occurred through our mediumship, though the usual mode of communication practised at our circles was the one which I still consider the best and most direct, as it is the simplest that of rapping to the alphabet.

I will only add, before dismissing the subject, that though it is so many years since I have ceased to practise the public exercise of my mediumship, I am not conscious that it has at all weakened or changed. On rare occasions I have given private sittings to confidential friends, and few days pass which do not bring me conscious evidence of the presence of Spirit friends. It was under their prompt

ing, and indeed direction, that I have written this book, and often during its progress have they given me their counsel at moments of doubt on my part as to what to insert or to omit. Happy, in so many ways, as has been my domestic life, I should be ungrateful if I did not realize how largely the unseen friends and visitors of my home have contributed to that happiness.

CHAPTER XXX.

MISCELLANEOUS INCIDENTS.

FELICIA HEMANS-SPIRIT DICTATIONS OF MUSIC.

In compliance with the advice and wishes of the friend who has aided me in putting together the scattered parts of my volume, I now proceed to wind it up with what I might call a sample assortment of "Incidents" out of my Spiritualistic experience. This was not within my original scheme of the work, but in the course of several months of intimate intercourse with him, there naturally arose in conversation frequent allusions to such reminiscences, leading me to tell him, under his intelligent interrogation, the story of them. The result was that he came to insist that some collection of them would constitute a useful as well as interesting addition to my "Missing Link." He therefore embraced many opportunities of returning to them, and drawing from me repetitions of the narratives, and jotting down notes, from which he then insisted that I should write them out, with a little kind assistance from him. This collection might easily have been greatly enlarged.

FELICIA HEMANS-SPIRIT DICTATION OF MUSIC.

The following is a beautiful and curious experience which came one evening at Rochester, in the early days of our mediumship:

Maggie and I were sitting alone in my cozy little parlor in Troup Street, enjoying ourselves by a warm fire while the pouring rain and howling winds outside assured us