Given this mild young musical man, the problems of how he achieved his
social successes, and how he managed to escape exposure, if he did his
miracles by conjuring, are almost equally perplexing. The second
puzzle is perhaps the less hard of the two, for Home did not make
money as a medium (though he took money's worth), and in private
society few seized and held the mystic hands that moved about, or when
they seized they could not hold them. The hands melted away, so people
said.

A sketch of Home's life must now be given.[16] He was born in 1833, at
Currie, a village near Edinburgh. In his later years he sent to his
second wife a photograph of the street of cottages beside the burn, in
one of which he first saw the light. His father had a right to bear
the arms of the Earls of Home, with a _brisure_, being the natural son
of Alexander, tenth Earl of Home.[17] The Medium's ancestor had
fought, or, according to other accounts, had shirked fighting, at
Flodden Field, as is popularly known from the ballad _The Sutors of
Selkirk_. The maiden name of Home's mother was Macneil. He was adopted
by an aunt, who, about 1842, carried the wondrous child to America. He
had, since he was four years old, given examples of second sight; it
was in the family. Home's mother, who died in 1850, was
second-sighted, as were her great-uncle, an Urquhart, and her uncle, a
Mackenzie. So far there was nothing unusual or alarming in Home's
case, at least to any intelligent Highlander. Not till 1850, after his
mother's death, did Home begin to hear 'loud blows on the head of my
bed, as if struck by a hammer.' The Wesley family, in 1716-17, had
been quite familiar with this phenomenon, and with other rappings, and
movements of objects untouched. In fact all these things are of
world-wide diffusion, and I know no part of the world, savage or
civilised, where such events do not happen, according to the evidence.