"Put your hand under the table."
No sooner done, than the invisible being gave him a hearty handshake, and proceeded:
"We wish you to believe in the—" It stopped.
"In what? In the medium?"
"No."
At that moment there came a gentle tapping on his knee, and looking down he found on it a small cardboard cross that had been lying on another table. Lytton, the story goes, begged permission to keep the cross as a souvenir, and promised that he would remember the spirit's injunction. For Home, of course, the incident was a splendid advertisement, as were the extravagant reports spread broadcast by other visitors. Consequently, when he visited Italy in the autumn as the guest of one of his English patrons, he gained instant recognition and was enabled to embark with phenomenal ease on his Continental crusade.
In order to reach the most striking manifestations of his peculiar ability, we must pass hurriedly over the events of the next few years, although they are perhaps the most picturesque of his career, including as they do séances with the third Napoleon and his Empress, with the King of Prussia, and with the Emperor of Russia. In Russia he was married to the daughter of a noble Russian family, and for groomsmen at his wedding had Count Alexis Tolstoi, the famous poet, and Count Bobrinski, one of the Emperor's chamberlains. This was in 1858, and shortly afterward he returned to England to repeat his spiritistic triumphs of 1855, and increase the already large group of influential and titled friends whose doors were ever open to him. Had it not been for their generosity, it is difficult, indeed, to see how he could have lived, for his time was almost altogether devoted to the practice of spiritism, and he was never known to accept a fee for a séance. As it was, he lived very well, now the guest of one, now of another, and the frequent recipient of costly presents. From England he fared back to the Continent, again traversing it by leisurely stages. Thus nearly a decade passed before the occurrence of the first of the several phenomena that have won Home an enduring place among the greatest lights of spiritism.
At that time his English patrons included the Viscount Adare and the Master of Lindsay, who have since become respectively the Earl of Dunraven and the Earl of Crawford. They were sitting one evening (December 16, 1868) in an upper room of a house in London with Home and a Captain Wynne, when Home suddenly left the room and entered the adjoining chamber. The opening of a window was then heard, and the next moment, to the amazement of all three, they perceived Home's form floating in the dim moonlight outside the window of the room in which they were seated. For an instant it hovered there, at a height of fully seventy feet above the pavement, and then, smiling and debonnair, Home was with them again. Another marvel immediately followed. At Home's request Lord Dunraven closed the window out of which the medium was supposed to have been carried by the spirits, and on returning observed that the window had not been raised a foot, and he did not see how a man could have squeezed through it. "Come," said Home, "I will show you." Together they went into the next room.
"He told me," Lord Dunraven reported, "to open the window as it was before. I did so. He told me to stand a little distance off; he then went through the open space, head first, quite rapidly, his body being nearly horizontal and apparently rigid. He came in again feet foremost, and we returned to the other room. It was so dark I could not see clearly how he was supported outside. He did not appear to grasp, or rest upon the balustrade, but rather to be swung out and in."
To Lord Dunraven and Lord Crawford again was given the boon of witnessing another of Home's most sensational performances, and on more than one occasion. This may best be described in Lord Crawford's own words, as related in his testimony to the London Dialectical Society's committee which in 1869 undertook an inquiry into the claims of spiritism.