The smile faded from the other’s face. He bent forward, listening intently.
“Go on,” he said.
“This spirit,” continued the medium, “says that he is glad to know you have not forgotten him. He says that he was with you this afternoon, when you went to the cemetery and took this flower from his grave.”
With a dramatic gesture Mr. Corliss drew from the lapel of his astonished auditor’s coat a sprig of geranium, and held it up so that all could see it.
“Am I not right?” he demanded.
“You are. Quite right.”
Afterward I joined the elderly gentleman on the sidewalk, and plied him with questions. I found him greatly mystified.
“This is too much for me,” said he. “I am a stranger to Brooklyn, and had never attended a spiritualist meeting until to-night. I only dropped in out of curiosity. But it is true that this afternoon I visited the cemetery where Henry Ward Beecher is buried, and picked this flower from near his grave, as a memento of my visit. Mr. Beecher was a very good friend to me in my younger days. How the medium could know these facts I cannot imagine. I had told nobody of my trip to the cemetery, and I am positive that no one saw me pick the flower.”
On another occasion I took an artist friend to the first séance he ever attended. The medium was a psychic of the Corliss type, an automatist who delivered his “spirit messages” by word of mouth. There were perhaps a dozen other sitters present. To one of these, a thin, gaunt, haggard-looking young woman, the entranced medium announced the presence of “a spirit named Wagner.” It was none other, it appeared, than the spirit of the great musician, who promised he would aid her with her musical compositions. A smile of infinite content transformed her careworn features, as she leaned over and whispered to my friend: