Each time I tried something harder. One day when visiting in the country, I dressed as a beggar, and going to a neighbour’s, while the good housewife was in the pantry getting me something to eat, stole her spectacles, took my food and went my way. Returning shortly after, with the other girls, I delivered the spectacles to the incredulous victim of my hoax. Then, in high feather I tackled a newly married elderly pair at the next farm, concocting my story on the spot and enjoying keenly their gullibility: I was destitute, was journeying afoot to my daughter in a distant town, naming a town on the spur of the moment. They asked my daughter’s name. Chancing to give the name of a new girl who had come to school that week, I myself met with a surprise, for the man said, “Why, _I_ know the Godfreys of Groton!” Quickly I begged him for news of my daughter, and asked about her husband whom I had never seen, catechizing him awhile, so he would let up on me, as their questions were proving quite a tax on my ingenuity. As I sat there after having lunched on pears and a glass of milk, which the deluded couple had given me, the other girls, impatient at my long stay, came down the road. The sympathetic farmer by that time was partly hitched up to take me as far on my way as the next village. As the girls came tentatively into the yard, my unsuspecting victims called out to them to come and have their fortunes told, dilating on the wonderful things I had told them. (I had done this to pay for my luncheon.) I don’t recall how the revelation came about, but I soon stood confessed, a sham beggar, while the man and his wife looked sheepishly at me, and at each other, at the mocking girls and the half-harnessed horses. Graver instances of duplicity I have to record concerning a planchette craze, rife in our neighbourhood when I was perhaps fifteen. Although we had had a planchette in the house for years, and I had heard how it was supposed to write, it had long lain neglected, none of us showing either curiosity or credulity concerning it. Our planchette was a heart-shaped piece of black walnut, large enough for the tips of the fingers of two hands to rest upon. Mounted upon two gutta-percha castors fastened to short brass legs, the third leg was formed by a lead-pencil stuck through a hole in the apex of the heart. When the right hands of two persons rest lightly on the planchette, the muscular tremor, I suppose, makes the machine move over the paper placed beneath. Some supernatural agency was supposed to make the thing reply to questions asked by someone present.