My good friend, Professor Mapes, was present at this, and public repute had made him know all about her. After she had gone he said to me, “You have done that poor woman more good than all the preachers of New York could ever have done. You have reformed one of the vilest of women.”
I afterward heard that her handsome adventurer-husband spent or got away from her all her money, and absconded, abandoning her; and that she died destitute and forlorn in a hospital in Paris. I could tell more tales than this of women who have passed through my hands, or rather those of the Spirits, between whom and them I have humbly served as a medium.
I have thus far carried my narrative down to the time at which my public mediumship closed with my marriage in 1858. Of the five years spent in New York, I have spoken only in the general manner of the present chapter, though were I to enter upon the field of particulars I should have to weary the reader’s patience with a second volume. I will only relate two episodes of that interesting period: the phosphorus affair, and the affair of the Harvard professors, for reasons which will be apparent. But I must give them each a chapter to itself.
[11] In this I but followed in the rut of custom. I do not now approve of crapes and lugubrious mourning. Why thus parade insignia of mourning for the mere disappearance of those whom we know to be now more alive than when they were fettered by the bonds of sublunary life—far, far happier and higher—and not less near and loving to us than they had been when we could see, hear, and feel them with our natural senses? Our immoderate grief only grieves them. Spiritualism will, one day, put an end to the trade in crape, “and,” the scribe might well add, “the enormous exactions of the undertaker, which often impoverish the living but sincere mourners.”
CHAPTER XX.
PHOSPHORUS.
Spirit Lights Visible at Dark Séances—Private Circle in Jersey City in 1857—Solid Granules of Phosphorus Appearing in Earth which I had Touched—Surprising and Distressing Letter—The Good Spirits and Daniel Underhill to the Rescue—Benjamin Franklin—Marriage to D. Underhill, November 2, 1858, and Close of My Public Mediumship—Analogous Phenomena in Private at Home.
I will here relate from my experiences a curious and, so far as I know, novel chapter in the records of Modern Spiritualism, namely, the production of solid granulated phosphorus by Spirits.
It will be seen that that phenomenon actually occurred through my mediumship, though under circumstances and appearances highly suggestive (to our enemies) of trickery on my part, and such as naturally to awaken uneasiness in the minds of friends whom long experience with me should have made, and had made, suspicion-proof in regard to me and my Spirit guides; and that for nearly nine months I was made very unhappy for the want of confirmatory evidence as to the real objective genuineness of the phenomenon sufficient to silence cavil and compel conviction. My unhappiness proceeded from the consciousness that some friends had doubted more or less (though never going the length of signifying doubt to myself), while I could not know who, nor how far doubt had taken distinct shape in their minds. To a person of my temperament and temper, however sustained by pride and conscious innocence, I cannot easily conceive a more painful situation. But thank God (and the good Spirits who have never failed me in the long run), this invisible cloud which for months chilled the atmosphere of my life, as a distressful something keenly felt though not to be seen, cleared off like the evaporation of dew from the surface of a mirror, as will be seen below.