He made use of his own daughter in the search. The coil of delusion led
him on until it became a choice of death or madness for the tender
instrument with which he felt his way into the unseen world.

There is _something_ along this road, call it odic force, or what you
will. Science has not, perhaps cannot, ever get firm footing here; but
the result of long and careful observation as yet only enables us to
strike a sort of average. Experiments pursued for years with
table-turning, planchettes, mediums, clairvoyantes, come to this. You do
get answers, strange messages, unaccountable communications; but nothing
is ever told, in any séance, which does not lie perdu in the breast of
someone of the company. There is often no willing deception;
peradventure, no fooling at all: but as you cannot draw water from a dry
well, neither can you get a message except the germ of it broods within
some soul with which you have some present contact.

And then, things being so, what advance can we make?

Many people seem to be unaware that to search after necromancers and
soothsayers is forbidden by the English law. Consequently--let us say--a
great number of cultivated ladies and gentlemen do, even in this
intelligent age, resort to the homes of such folk; aye, and consult
them, too, eagerly, at the most critical junctures in their lives.

I know of a London washerwoman by trade who makes vastly more money by
falling into trances than by her legitimate calling, to which she adds
the letting of lodgings.

On one occasion she was commissioned to comment, in her swoon, on the
truth or constancy of a girl's lover; an unopened letter from him being