“Oh, by all means!” exclaimed Doctor Weasel, springing to his feet in a paroxysm of delight. “Let us have the experiment, by all means! Do please place your hand on the top of her head!”
Manton turned, and with a bow most studiously deferential, seemed to ask of the lady her permission to do so.
“Oh, yes, yes,” and her head was bowed forward to meet his upraised hand; while the daughter, who seemed to understand the thing, either from previous experience, or from some private signal, rose from her clinging position about his knee, and stepped back, leaving the two alone, without other contact.
In a few moments after the hand of Manton had rested upon the meek, submissive head of the woman before him, she commenced exhibiting the common and preliminary attitudes, muscular retchings of the throat, nervous twitchings of the lips and limbs, accompanied by the apparently palpable, organic changes, which are recognised to be symptomatic with well-known conditions of the mesmeric sleep.
Manton watched all these phenomena with the sharpest attention, and then, as the lips began to move as if in inarticulate enunciation, he leant forward over her, and asked—
“What can you tell us of the soul, with which you are now in communication?”
After several preluding and spasmodic efforts to articulate sounds, the Clairvoyant at length said, in a voice only distinct above a whisper—
“I see light! all light!—pure, holy light. It fills the universe with a mild radiance! I can see no blurs, no clouds in the foreground. I can see only angels, seraphs, and seraphim, and all forms of light revolving in the sphere of this mighty soul!”
“Is there no evil there?” said Manton.
“No, I see none; I see only white light.”