assuaged." 

 "Do you often have these trances?" said Bleak, with a certain wistfulness. 

 "They are not hard to induce," she said. "All that is necessary for a seance is a round table, preferably of some highly polished brown wood, a brass rail for the worshipers to put their feet on, and an empty tumbler to concentrate the power of yearning. If those present all wish hard enough there is sure to be a successful reunion with the Beyond." 

 "But surely," said the fascinated editor, "surely not any—well, actual MATERIALIZATION?" 

 "Oh, no; but the communion of souls produces quite sufficient results. You see, so many fine spirits passed over at once, suddenly, on that First of July, that the twentieth plane is quite thronged with them, and they are just as eager to come back as their friends could be to welcome them. One good yearn deserves another, as we say. The only time when these seances fail is when some inharmonious soul is present—some personality not completely EN RAPPORT with the spirit of the gathering. I remember, for instance, an occasion when a gentleman from Kentucky had most ardently desired to get into communication with the astrals of some mint juleps he had loved very deeply in life. Everything seemed propitious, but though I struggled hard I simply could not get the julep spirit to descend to our mortal plane. Finally I made inquiry and found that one of the guests was a root-beer manufacturer. Of course you may say that was petty jealousy on the side of the departed, but even these vanished spirits have their human phases." 

 She was silent for a moment. 

 "You can imagine," she said, "what a perplexity I was in when I discovered these hitherto unsuspected powers in myself. Was I justified in putting them to use, for the good of humanity? And wasn't there a certain pathetic significance in the fact that I, the daughter of the man who had done so much to put these poor lonely spirits into the Beyond, should be made their sole channel of reunion with their bereaved and sorrowing adorers? In all his harangues, I had never heard my Father attack anything but the actual DRINKING of liquor. This form of communication seemed to me to solve so many problems. And it was in this way that I first met Virgil." 

 "Virgil?" said Bleak, absent-mindedly, for he was wondering whether he might be privileged to attend one of these seances. 

 "Virgil Quimbleton," she said. "In the early days of my 

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