These and other questions of equally profound importance greet the spirit-world, and whose is the fault if valuable information be not given? Did the spirit fail to give. it owing to your lack of demand for anything higher, or because it did not possess the power? These are two questions which each investigator had best earnestly think about before pronouncing his decided opinion on the subject. The spirit-world always gives to mortals just what mortals seek. As water finds its own level, so does human intelligence; and when you enter the séance-room with a desire for good, and allow the free action of the spirits present, you will receive spiritual communications of value and assistance for yourself."

Even under the present conditions, however, advice and assistance of an invaluable kind have been given to persons who could have obtained such aid from no human being, and who recognise with gratitude the more individual uses of spiritual truths.

Some persons have gone to William Fletcher in disguise, and found that there are presences around them to whom their disguise is more flimsy than a muslin veil would be to us. One such instance is given in the article in Life. "Our Merlin of Steinway Hall, tells a story of an attempt to play upon him a practical joke, which says something for his capacity to discriminate between Adonis and Phyllis, quite irrespective of its alleged mediumistic certitude. A person, attired in widow's weeds, called upon him, and to judge by the profuse application of a mouchoir, seemed to be overwhelmed with affliction. The object of the visit was to ascertain whether, by means of divination, Mr. Fletcher would state where a missing will could be discovered, the

F

person affirming that, owing to the loss of this document, ruin had befallen an orphaned family. After requesting the said person to wait till the spirit moved him, Mr. Fletcher went off into a trance, and then delivered himself oracularly thus: 'I see a fair young man, and a lady and gentleman standing near him. Now they are laughing. Before them is a pile of black clothing. Now they are putting the black clothes upon the fair young man, and now a wig upon his head. Now they cover his head with a white crape bonnet and a long veil. The young man is evidently playing a part. They ring for the servant, and order the carriage. Now they put him in the carriage, still laughing. The carriage drives away with the young man in it. stops at the door. You are the young man.'"

It

And a similar testimony to Winona's sagacity is given in the Spiritualist of May 2nd, 1879, signed "Ellen Crump," who says: “A few days ago I had a curious test-sitting with Mr. J. W. Fletcher, which I think will be interesting to others. I sat with him for the first time about eighteen months ago. I was then a perfect stranger to him, but he told me some interesting truths about my life, and gave me some useful medical advice. Since then I have become slightly acquainted with him personally, and being particularly anxious to obtain some plain information and advice from his controlling spirit, Winona, untinged by any possible influence which his personal knowledge of me might give to her communications, and also to test his powers, I wrote from an address unknown to him, in a strange hand, under a feigned name, to ask for an appointment on Saturday, after six, and received one line in reply,

pointing eight o'clock. That he had no suspicion I was

his sitter for Saturday, I am quite sure. On the eventful evening I entered the séance room, with a beating heart, fearing detection, though I had a thick crape veil on over two thinner ones, and sat with my back to the low-burning light, and only bowed silently when Mr. Fletcher entered, for fear my voice even should betray me. I need not have taken half so much trouble. Mr. Fletcher had had so many strangers sitting with him that he was absolutely incurious, even rather listless and indifferent, and decidedly tired, and simply requested me with distant politeness to remove my glove, and in a few minutes was in the land of shadows, and Winona's pleasant voice asked if she should tell me what she saw. After listening quietly to her account of my general life, which was very accurate, I asked what I thought a dexterous question; she paused a moment before replying, and then said, naïvely, 'Do you think that I don't know you?' I replied that I was not sure; but she said, very decidedly, 'I know you quite well, and however many veils you put on I should always know you; I can see the influences around you, very plainly.' I asked if her medium knew me. 'Oh no,' she said, 'he does not care; he was not thinking about it,' and this must have been true, for when, at the close of our sitting, Mr. Fletcher returned and resumed his polite and distant manner, I asked him if he had any notion who I was, but he had not the least idea; and when I raised my veil his genuine laugh of amusement and exclamation proved how entirely he had been in the dark. I may add that Winona gave me some clear-headed advice, and shewed, without any explanation from me, a most intimate acquaintance with the troubles and complications surrounding me."

CHAPTER VI.

SPIRIT IDENTITY (Continued).

THIS important question of the identity of communicating spirits, while it renders William Fletcher's mediumship unusually valuable to inquirers, forms also an obstacle to the publication of those facts most calculated to break down every kind of opposition. Even in the published notices of his work, the facts are often imperfectly given, or altogether suppressed. I quote an instance recorded in the Spiritualist of July 13th, 1877, soon after his arrival in England.

"A few days ago, a séance was held at the house of Mrs. Makdougall Gregory, 21, Green Street, Grosvenor Square, at which Mr. J. W. Fletcher, the trance-medium, told a lady present all the details of certain private and important. business she had transacted at her lawyer's a few hours previously. The details were so exactly given, and the communicating spirits so precisely described, that were we to print the details the whole case would be recognised by those interested." Again, in the same journal of October 12th, 1877: "Mrs. FitzGerald, of 44, Eastbourne Terrace, Hyde Park, writes that, at a recent séance with Mr. Fletcher, much evidence of spirit-identity was given to persons unknown to the medium, but that the facts themselves are of such a private nature that she cannot publish them."

Mrs. Louisa Andrews, in a letter to the Spiritualist of February 28th, 1879, also dwells upon this point. 'Mr. Fletcher," she writes, "might have been acquainted with me

for years, and have seen little or nothing of certain things which were spoken of through his lips, as if the inner life, hidden behind a veil which even friendship might not lift, were as familiar to him as household words. Those things which carry conviction with startling force to one's mind and heart, are just those which cannot be talked about."

However much we may regret that a mass of evidence is thus lost to the world, its character is undoubtedly of a kind to enable us to endorse the opinion expressed by Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, that an interview with Mr. Fletcher "carries to the mind a fuller conviction of the reality of spirit-life than all the physical phenomena he had ever witnessed."

Of Winona's remarkable powers of prevision there are numberless instances. Mrs. FitzGerald alludes to them in a very interesting paper, entitled "Experiences in the Home. Circle," published in the Spiritualist of November 22nd, 1878. Remarking upon the character of William Fletcher's mediumship, she says: "He (Winona) gave names, and tests and messages, and foretold events of which I was then entirely ignorant. and directed me in a course I was to pursue, the very reverse of what I intended, and the result was as he foretold."

Some excellent proofs of this peculiar power, which seems to be a natural faculty of the disembodied spirit, are given in an excellent article in the University Magazine of June, 1879, entitled "The Preternatural in the Present Day." I shall make no apology for quoting them at length, and thus obtaining for the facts, probably, a more permanent record even than a well-known monthly periodical can bestow.