“I have,” he said, “for my sins to submit occasionally to the society of live bores. I refuse to go out of my way to spend an evening in the dark with dead bores.”
The spiritualists themselves admit that their table-rapping spooks are precious dull dogs; it would be difficult, in face of the communications recorded, for them to deny it. They explain to us that they have not yet achieved communication with the higher spiritual Intelligences. The more intelligent spirits—for some reason that the spiritualists themselves are unable to explain—do not want to talk to them, appear to have something else to do. At present—so I am told, and can believe—it is only the spirits of lower intelligence that care to turn up on these evenings. The spiritualists argue that, by continuing, the higher-class spirits will later on be induced to “come in.” I fail to follow the argument. It seems to me that we are frightening them away. Anyhow, myself I shall wait awhile.
When the spirit comes along that can talk sense, that can tell me something I don’t know, I shall be glad to meet him. The class of spirit that we are getting just at present does not appeal to me. The thought of him—the reflection that I shall die and spend the rest of eternity in his company—does not comfort me.
She is now a Believer.
A lady of my acquaintance tells me it is marvellous how much these spirits seem to know. On her very first visit, the spirit, through the voice of the medium—an elderly gentleman residing obscurely in Clerkenwell—informed her without a moment’s hesitation that she possessed a relative with the Christian name of George. (I am not making this up—it is real.) This gave her at first the idea that spiritualism was a fraud. She had no relative named George—at least, so she thought. But a morning or two later her husband received a letter from Australia. “By Jove!” he exclaimed, as he glanced at the last page, “I had forgotten all about the poor old beggar.”
“Whom is it from?” she asked.
“Oh, nobody you know—haven’t seen him myself for twenty years—a third or fourth cousin of mine—George—”
She never heard the surname, she was too excited. The spirit had been right from the beginning; she had a relative named George. Her faith in spiritualism is now as a rock.
There are thousands of folk who believe in Old Moore’s Almanac. My difficulty would be not to believe in the old gentleman. I see that for the month of January last he foretold us that the Government would meet with determined and persistent opposition. He warned us that there would be much sickness about, and that rheumatism would discover its old victims. How does he know these things? Is it that the stars really do communicate with him, or does he “feel it in his bones,” as the saying is up North?
During February, he mentioned, the weather would be unsettled. He concluded: