“When your assistant touches your foot you will know that he is ready to make the exchange again, by which the sitter will get hold of the slates he fastened. When you get the signal you give a snort and jump that jerks the end of the slates from the sitter’s hand. He is now given the end of the slates held by your assistant, and you will allow the assistant to take the dummy. After sitting a moment or two longer, you will tell the sitter to take out his slates and examine them if he chooses. Many times they do not open the slates until they reach their homes.
“This, reader, is the man who will declare that he furnished the slates and did not allow them out of his hands a minute.
“The usual method of obtaining the writing is for the medium to hold the slates alone. When this is the case the medium passes the slates below, and receives in return a dummy which he is continually thumping on the under side of the table for the purpose of showing the sitter that the slates are there all the time.
“It is not necessary that you should use a cellar to get this phase of ‘independent slate-writing.’ You could place your table against a partition door and by fitting one of the small panels with hinges and bolts, would have a very convenient way of obtaining the assistance of the spirit in the next room. It is also possible to make a trap in a room that has a wooden wainscoting.”
Before closing this brief survey of slate-writing experiments, I must describe an exceedingly ingenious trick, indeed, bordering on the marvelous. It is the recent invention of a Western conjurer, and solves the problem of actually writing between locked slates by physical means. The effect is as follows: You request the sitter to take two slates, wash them carefully, and tie them together, after first having placed a bit of chalk between their surfaces. Hold them under the table for a minute, and then hand them to the sitter for examination. A name, or a short sentence, in answer to some question, will be found scrawled across the upper surface of the bottom slate. It is accomplished in this way. You take a small pellet of iron or steel, coat it with mucilage, and dip it into chalk or slate-pencil dust. This dust will adhere and harden into a consistent mass, after a little while, completely concealing the metal, and causing the whole to resemble a bit of chalk. Take this supposed pellet of chalk from your vest pocket and place it between the slates; hold the latter level beneath a table, and by moving the poles of a strong magnet against the surface of the under slate, you can cause the iron or steel to write a name or sentence, thanks to its coating of chalk dust. It is better to use slates with rather deep frames, in order that the chalked metal may write with facility. It requires considerable practice to write with ease in the manner described above. The first thing of course is to locate the position of the chalk between the locked slates. To enable you to do this, place the supposed chalk in one corner of slate No. 1 before covering with slate No. 2, or else exactly in the center of slate No. 2. In this way you will have no difficulty in affecting the metal with the magnet, when the slates are held under the table. There are various ways of holding the slates; one, is to ask the sitter to hold one end, while you hold the other, five or six inches above the table. The light is put out, and you take the magnet from your pocket and execute the writing. The noise of the magnet passing over the surface of the under slate serves to represent a disembodied spirit as doing the writing.
2. The Master of the Mediums.
One of the most remarkable personalities serving as an exponent of Spiritualism was Daniel Dunglas Home, the Napoleon of necromancy, and the Past Grand Master of Mediums. His career reads like a romance. He lived in a sort of twilight land, and hob-nobbed with kings, queens and other people of noble blood.
“Something unsubstantial, ghostly,
Seems this Theurgist,
In deep meditation mostly
Wrapped, as in a mist.
Vague, phantasmal and unreal,
To our thoughts he seems,
Walking in a world ideal,
In a land of dreams.”
He wound his serpentine way into the best society of London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, and St. Petersburg—“always despising filthy lucre,” as Maskelyn remarks, “but never refusing a diamond worth ten times the amount he would have received in cash, or some present, which the host of the house at which he happened to be manifesting always felt constrained to offer.”