embody a new age, and its highest impulses come through them, and them alone.

Moreover, a medium who, like William Fletcher, dared to keep a respectable roof over his head by his own unaided exertions, to mix in social life, to dress and live like a gentleman, and to hold his own as a man, who did not, and was not meant to dwell in a corner and rail at everybody else, and who would brook neither patronage nor insult from either spiritualist or sceptic, was of course a being whom the "true spiritual worker" should piously shun. Such a life alone-to those who had not attained it—was hopelessly wrong. When the time came for him to take the only period of rest he had had for three years, the enemy who had crept into their home found many all too ready for their betrayal, and the first sounds of the calumnies in the American newspapers, and of the Boston policecourt, were greeted with triumph as the long-expected fall of the Fletchers.

In England there were, to their eternal disgrace, those who were only too eager to carry on the war and crush them; their home was ransacked in their absence, their letters removed, and a warrant of arrest taken out to persecute them afresh. Malice and love of revenge on the part of some, and a lamentable want of courage on the part of others, combined to betray them and their cause alike to the public prejudice and the courts of mis-called justice which are its instruments, and they were dared to return. To drag the Fletchers in the dust was worth the price of the truth of spiritualism, and it was eagerly paid.

They were, indeed, called upon, as had been foretold seven years before, to sacrifice every earthly possession for

the sake of principle, and inspired alike with a consciousness of her innocence, and of the great reality which has literally forced itself upon the consciousness of our busy and unwilling age, Susan Fletcher, who has already told the story of her life too fully to render it necessary for me to revert to its facts, dared to face the utmost that could be done to destroy reputation, home, happiness, even life itself, and in the thirty-third year of modern spiritualism lifted it in the hour of its crisis to its right place, as a cause which, however unrecognised, has its heroes and its heroines and its martyrs, no less than the early Christianity, in like manner everywhere spoken against," of the past.

This imprisonment of a medium in the world's great modern Babylon, full of all things which appeal to the senses and the pleasure of an hour, and dead to the inner life of man—was the designed event of the year 1881.

66

CHAPTER XVI.

ALONE IN AMERICA.

They are the hunted birds,

Of pierced and bleeding breast.

EFORE the storm which had so long been silently

BEFORE

gathering burst upon the Fletchers, William Fletcher was purposely removed from London, the place where it was destined to culminate. A man, who in truth lived in two worlds at once, and who possessed the extreme sensitiveness arising from the strain of living under spiritual conditions far in advance of the present age, he would at once have sunk under the terrible burden of a public trial, and would have received almost before the prison-doors had opened, a sentence of death. From this the spirit-world determined, notwithstanding his own eager and reckless impulses, to protect him, while he was permitted to face alone an amount of mental anguish and open cruelty and injustice, before which the strongest spirit might well quail.

The spirit Winona had indeed been allowed to warn him long before, but it had seemed at the time needless and almost heartless to act upon her words with regard to one who appeared sent to bless and aid them after a long struggle, and whom they had hoped to make happy in return. Not until the blow had been struck did he realise her faithfulness, and then it was that he wrote from Boston: "Oh, that I had trusted my dear Winona more then all would have been well. I expect a

long, hard fight before I am able to place myself right before the world."

Ill in body, sick at heart, and often well-nigh fainting under the heavy weight of his cross, he went on with his work of lecturing and describing the spirits he saw with a courage which nothing seemed to conquer. On the departure of his wife, whom he loved less with the special devotion of man for woman, than the enthusiastic worship of a devotee for a saint who had been the guardian of his life and the upholder of his work, he at once bravely appeared before the people at all risks, and quietly faced all that press, and popular slander, and the brutal malice of many of his co-workers in the cause could do against him. Even his clairvoyance was at times a cruel gift. On the day of the arrival of the steamer which bore her to England he saw in a vision her arrest, and read the following day the cable which confirmed it in the Boston papers.

All through the winter of 1880 and 1881 he lectured in Philadelphia, Lowell, Portland, and many other places, in each of them giving descriptions of visions which have been rightly described as "unparalleled in the history of psychological or clairvoyant experiences." At the very time of his wife's trial he addressed an audience of 3,000 persons at a great anniversary of spiritualism in the Boston Music Hall, and that no law on earth, no opposition, no wretchedness will ever subdue the spirit of a true medium can be proved from his own words in a private letter which I have in my possession, and in which he wrote, "I have no more tears to shed. I lose myself in work, unremitting labour labour that takes all the strength I am possessed

1

of, and leaves me at night tired and worn out, and yet firm of purpose."

A few began to recognise the earnest spirit of the man, and one, himself a sufferer in the anti-slavery cause, Dr. J. Murray Spear, of Philadelphia, lifted up his voice in his behalf with a clearness of perception and a nobility of feeling which make his words deserve to be permanently recorded. "Being," he said, "one of the first mediums developed in America, and now probably the oldest, I have seen and studied mediumship in all its multifarious forms, and have settled opinions respecting the powers and uses of this class of persons. Some of them have sailed on smooth seas and been honoured, while others, quite as faithful to their convictions, have been despised and rejected because used in ways that violated popular standards of society, morals and religion. Socially ostracised, or neglected by those who could but did not aid them, some good mediums, becoming discouraged, have been compelled to seek other avocations and retire to private life. Others have nobly braved the storms of persecution and become stronger and more earnest workers. Among the last-named is to be found John William Fletcher. While speaking in Philadelphia during the months of March and May, I have enjoyed frequent and favourable opportunities of hearing and observing him in public and private, and have read attentively what the newspapers of England and America have said of him, and have the high satisfaction of believing him so far removed from the mean motives and low practices ascribed to him, as scarcely to be able to comprehend the imputations made upon his character. He has uncomplainingly and manfully gone forward in the work