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I can hardly express the relief I experienced at the result of this seance. Convinced as I had long been of the good faith of William Eddy; satisfied as my reason was that it was a physical impossibility for the man to simulate such a variety of forms, making himself at one moment a patriarch of eighty or a tottering grandmother, and the next a babe in arms or a toddling child of three or four years; now a giant Indian chief or a dancing squaw, and anon a roving spearsman of the plain of Ararat or a bronze-faced fellah from the foot of the Pyramids; twisting his inflexible tongue around the gutturals, nasals, and sibilants of numerous languages that certainly nobody outside of the Oriental Society or some occasional Dominie Sampson had mastered; convinced, I say, as I was upon all these points—that ventilating window, hollow platform, and seven-by-two cabinet forced themselves oftener than I liked between my mental vision and the bald facts—I confess to a feeling closely akin to astonishment when Honto, the selfsame copper-coloured squaw, the pipe-smoking, shawl-weaving, dancing, laughing Honto, stepped out and confronted me. It seemed that it would be next to impossible for enough of the spiritual matter-essence to filter through that plastered wall for these cunning electro-platers to make a covering withal for their filmy forms. But there she was, sure enough, in full form—with no detail of her dress lacking, no lock of her massive suit of hair gone; her figure as plump, her motions as supple, her attitudes as widely statuesque as ever before. When she had passed away from our sight, I awaited the coming of the next spirit with eager attention, for, even then it seemed to me that it could not be possible for another to materialise itself. Honto was the familiar spirit of the medium, or somehow attached to, and, as it were, enamelled upon the family, so that she could do impossibilities that no one else from the other world could. But, in the midst of my doubt and mistrust, there came the grey-white apparition of old Mrs. Pritchard, the very starch in her apron and cap seeming as if it were crisp from the laundry. Then, I think, the conviction formed itself that, no matter how many “sceptics” came battering against the granitic {{Style S-HPB SB. Continued on|1-16}} | I can hardly express the relief I experienced at the result of this seance. Convinced as I had long been of the good faith of William Eddy; satisfied as my reason was that it was a physical impossibility for the man to simulate such a variety of forms, making himself at one moment a patriarch of eighty or a tottering grandmother, and the next a babe in arms or a toddling child of three or four years; now a giant Indian chief or a dancing squaw, and anon a roving spearsman of the plain of Ararat or a bronze-faced fellah from the foot of the Pyramids; twisting his inflexible tongue around the gutturals, nasals, and sibilants of numerous languages that certainly nobody outside of the Oriental Society or some occasional Dominie Sampson had mastered; convinced, I say, as I was upon all these points—that ventilating window, hollow platform, and seven-by-two cabinet forced themselves oftener than I liked between my mental vision and the bald facts—I confess to a feeling closely akin to astonishment when Honto, the selfsame copper-coloured squaw, the pipe-smoking, shawl-weaving, dancing, laughing Honto, stepped out and confronted me. It seemed that it would be next to impossible for enough of the spiritual matter-essence to filter through that plastered wall for these cunning electro-platers to make a covering withal for their filmy forms. But there she was, sure enough, in full form—with no detail of her dress lacking, no lock of her massive suit of hair gone; her figure as plump, her motions as supple, her attitudes as widely statuesque as ever before. When she had passed away from our sight, I awaited the coming of the next spirit with eager attention, for, even then it seemed to me that it could not be possible for another to materialise itself. Honto was the familiar spirit of the medium, or somehow attached to, and, as it were, enamelled upon the family, so that she could do impossibilities that no one else from the other world could. But, in the midst of my doubt and mistrust, there came the grey-white apparition of old Mrs. Pritchard, the very starch in her apron and cap seeming as if it were crisp from the laundry. Then, I think, the conviction formed itself that, no matter how many “sceptics” came battering against the granitic {{Style S-HPB SB. Continued on|1-16}} | ||