“My two children were playing one day in the drawing-room at a game they had invented for their own amusement; the younger had bandaged his elder brother’s eyes and made him guess the objects that he touched, and when later he guessed right they changed places. This simple game suggested to me the most complicated idea that ever crossed my mind. Pursued by the notion, I ran and shut myself in my workshop, and was fortunately in that happy state when the mind follows easily the combinations traced by fancy. I rested my head in my hands, and in my excitement laid down the first principles of second sight.” It is hard to reconcile this statement with truth in view of the fact that memory training, as he describes it, was in vogue and practised long before[129] his time and is not the way second sight is learned. It could not have been discovered or invented by him except coincidentally by his utter lack of knowledge bearing on the methods of seership and clairvoyance as practised either in his time or antiquity. Let me explain clearly, and I hope once for all, the valuelessness of his letters as far as they relate to Spiritualism and clairvoyance. In the first place the blindfold test[130] as produced by Alexis Didier to mystify Houdin. Putting cotton on the eyes and covering it with a handkerchief is now used by amateurs in the cheapest kind of what we term “muscle reading.” There is not the slightest difficulty in seeing beneath such a bandage, sometimes over it, and the range of vision can easily be determined by a test. In Paris I saw a mysterious performer, named Benoval, who had his eyes glued together with adhesive paper, on top of it cotton was placed, and over the cotton a handkerchief, but he danced around bottles and burning candles without any difficulty. Regarding the information given clairvoyantly to Madame Robert Houdin during another seance with Alexis; Houdin at that time was one of the best known characters of Paris, a public person, and it was the easiest thing in the world for Alexis to gather information concerning him and his family. Houdin may not have been acquainted with the subtlety of what we now term “fishing,” “stalling,” or “killing time,” in order to get information or put something over. He might have been mystified but his knowledge of Spiritualism and clairvoyance was nil according to his own statement.