"Why not? Are we to doubt a thing merely because it is contrary to our experience? If you had stated thirty years ago that you would be able to converse with a friend on board a ship nearly four hundred miles away, or that you could see a man's bones in his body, or photograph the contents of a sealed wooden box, would not everyone have declared you mad? And yet these things are being done every day. Why then should the things you have just mentioned be less credible? The evidence in their favour is overwhelming. There is hardly a family in the world but contains some member who has experienced such things. Nay, I will go farther, there is not a tribe in any nation, at any period of the world's history which has not believed in these things. As Abraham Lincoln once said, 'You may fool all men some time, you may fool some men for all time, but you cannot fool all men for all time.' No, sir, the things men laugh at to-day as impossible will be improbable to-morrow, conceivable the day after, and a little later everyone accepts them as a matter of course, and wonders how people could ever have been such fools as to have doubted them."
"But what evidence is there," said Riche, "that these apparitions and marvellous phenomena really occur? Why are séances held in the dark, or in merely a dull red light? If the performers were not tricksters could they not show these things in full daylight?"
"Permit me to ask you one question, my dear doctor," said Delapine. "Why do you develop your photographic plate in the dark and not in broad daylight?"
"The reason is obvious—the light would spoil the plate."
"Well then, might not the light interfere with the success of the phenomena of a séance in the same way? The one is just as logical as the other."
"Bravo, bravo," cried Renée, clapping her hands.
"Pardon me," said Riche, anxious to justify himself, "but what I complain of is the absence of any proof. What I demand is evidence that is unimpeachable and crushing before I can believe any of these things. All I ask for is some proof, some message purporting to come from the other world through spirits who will convince me that the dead live, and that they can communicate with us."
"You shall have it, you shall have it," cried the professor, rubbing his hands. "Have you ever heard the story of the Widow's Mite?"
"No" they all cried out together.
"Well, then, if you allow me, I will relate it to you."