Then follows an account of a fairly good séance—taps on the marble table, reading pellets, describing persons, etc., until I thought Foster was tired of the interview and was feigning sleep to end it. All of a sudden he sprang to his feet with such an expression of horror and consternation as an actor playing Macbeth would have given a good deal to imitate. His eyes glared, his breast heaved, his hands clenched….
“Why did you come here?” cried Foster, in a wail that seemed to come from the bottom of his soul. “Why do you come here to torment me with such a sight? Oh, God! It’s horrible! It’s horrible!… It is your father I see!… He died fearfully! He died fearfully! He was in Texas—on a horse—with cattle. He was alone. It is the prairies! Alone! The horse fell! He was under it! His thigh was broken—horribly broken! The horse ran away and left him! He lay there stunned! Then he came to his senses! Oh! his thigh was dreadful! Such agony! My God! Such agony!”
Foster fairly screamed at this. The younger of the men … broke into violent sobs. His companion wept, too, and the pair of them clasped hands. Bartlett looked on concerned. As for me, I was astounded.
“He was four days dying—four days dying—of starvation and thirst,” Foster went on, as if deciphering some terrible hieroglyphs written on the air. “His thigh swelled to the size of his body. Clouds of flies settled on him—flies and vermin—and he chewed his own arm and drank his own blood. He died mad. And my God! he crawled three miles in those four days! Man! Man! that’s how your father died!”
So saying, with a great sob, Foster dropped into his chair, [pg 154]his cheeks purple, and tears running down them in rivers. The younger man … burst into a wild cry of grief and sank upon the neck of his friend. He, too, was sobbing as if his own heart would break. Bartlett stood over Foster wiping his forehead with a handkerchief….
“It’s true,” said the younger man’s friend; “his father was a stock-raiser in Texas, and after he had been missing from his drove for over a week, they found him dead and swollen with his leg broken. They tracked him a good distance from where he must have fallen. But nobody ever heard till now how he died.” …
Now it is hardly to be supposed that the young visitor could ever have had this scene in his mind as vividly as Foster had. In that case where and how did Foster get the vividness and emotion? How do we get them in dreams? He dreamed while he was awake.
As Bartlett quotes this, and as it declares him to have been present, he of course attests it by quoting it. So in each of Bartlett’s quoted cases, the original witness is the reporter in the newspaper, and Bartlett, who was present (he was Foster’s traveling companion and business agent) thus confirms it. We know Mr. Bartlett personally, and have thorough confidence in his sanity and sincerity. We have also been at the pains to learn that he commands the confidence and respect of his fellow townsmen in Tolland, Connecticut, where he is passing a green old age. Moreover, he does not interpret these phenomena by “spiritism.”
We also had a sitting with Foster, in which he undoubtedly showed abundant telepathy, and satisfied us that he was fundamentally honest, though not always discriminating between his involuntary impressions, and his natural impulses to help out their coherence and interest.