“During the sitting keep an open mind and a closed mouth,” she replied, cheerfully.     

       As I said at the beginning, this is not a ghost story. Parts of it we now understand, other parts we do not. For the physical phenomena we have no adequate explanation. They occurred. We saw and heard them. For the other part of the seance we have come to a conclusion satisfactory to ourselves, a conclusion not reached, however, until some of us had gone through some dangerous experiences, and had been brought into contact with things hitherto outside the orderly progression of our lives.     

       But at no time, although incredible things happened, did any one of us glimpse that strange world of the spirit that seemed so often almost within our range of vision.     

       Miss Jeremy, the medium, was due at 8:30 and at 8:20 my wife assisted Mrs. Dane into one of the straight chairs at the table, and Sperry, sent out by her, returned with a darkish bundle in his arms, and carrying a light bamboo rod.     

       “Don’t ask me what they are for,” he said to Herbert’s grin of amusement.       “Every workman has his tools.”      

       Herbert examined the rod, but it was what it appeared to be, and nothing else.     

       Some one had started the phonograph in the library, and it was playing gloomily, “Shall we meet beyond the river?” At Sperry’s request we stopped talking and composed ourselves, and Herbert, I remember, took a tablet of some sort, to our intense annoyance, and crunched it in his teeth. Then Miss Jeremy came in.     

       She was not at all what we had expected. Twenty-six, I should say, and in a black dinner dress. She seemed like a perfectly normal young woman, even attractive in a fragile, delicate way. Not much personality, perhaps; the very word “medium” precludes that. A “sensitive,” I think she called herself. We were presented to her, and but for the stripped and bare room, it might have been any evening after any dinner, with bridge waiting.     

       When she shook hands with me she looked at me keenly. “What a strange day it has been!” she said. “I have been very nervous. I only hope I can do what you want this evening.”      

       “I am not at all sure what we do want, Miss Jeremy,” I replied.     

 Prev. P 9/96 next