But upon this night they received a visitor. The pointer suddenly became endowed with an unusual agility, and with great rapidity presented this introduction:
“Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name.”
The women gazed, round-eyed, at each other, and the board continued:
“Wait. I would speak with thee. If thou shalt live, then so shall I. I make my bread by thy hearth. Good friends, let us be merrie. The time for work is past. Let the tabbie drowse and blink her wisdom to the firelog.”
“How quaint that is!” one of the women exclaimed.
“Good Mother Wisdom is too harsh for thee,” said the board, “and thou shouldst love her only as a foster mother.”
Thus began an intimate association with “Patience Worth” that still continues, and a series of communications that in intellectual vigor and literary quality are virtually without precedent in the scant imaginative literature quoted in the chronicles of psychic phenomena.
The personality of Patience Worth—if personality it may be called—so impressed itself upon these women, at the first visit, that they got pencil and paper and put down not only all that she transmitted through the board, but all the questions and comment that elicited her remarks; and at every meeting since then, a verbatim record has been made of the conversation and the communications.
These records have accumulated until they have filled several volumes of typewritten pages, and upon them, and upon the writer’s personal observations of the workings of the phenomena, this narrative is based. They include conversations, maxims, epigrams, allegories, tales, dramas, poems, all the way from sportive to religious, and even prayers, most of them of no little beauty and of a character that may reasonably be considered unique in literature.