Nor was it in England alone that able men were completely fooled by the Davenports’ performance. Frenchmen as well, after seeing the exhibition, hastened to put their favorable opinions in writing. Hamilton, a well-known expert in the art of legerdemain, and son-in-law of Robert Houdin, the famous conjuror, wrote: “Messrs. Davenport,--Yesterday I had the pleasure of being present at the seance you gave, and I came away from it convinced that jealousy alone was the cause of the outcry against you. The phenomena produced surpassed my expectations, and your experiments were full of interest for me. I consider it my duty to add that those phenomena are inexplicable, and the more so by such persons as have thought themselves able to guess your supposed secret, and who are, in fact, far indeed from discovering the truth. “Hamilton.” M. Rhys, a manufacturer of conjuring implements and himself an inventor of tricks, wrote the Davenports: “... I have returned from one of your seances quite astonished. As a person who has devoted many years to the manufacture of instruments for legerdemain performances, my statement made with due regard to fidelity, and guided by the knowledge long experience has given me, will, I trust, be of some value to you.... I was admitted to examine your cabinet and instruments ... with the greatest care but failed to find anything that could justify legitimate suspicions. From that moment I felt that the insinuations cast about you were false and malevolent.” These are but a few of innumerable instances where men of culture, knowledge and experience, were deluded by the performance of the Davenport Brothers, just as men are to-day with my presentations, and when the reader takes into consideration the confession of Ira Erastus Davenport[33] to me in 1909, and the fact that he taught me his full method of manipulating seances, he can then form some conception of the extent to which the most intelligent minds can be led astray by what seem to them phenomena, but to me, mere problems susceptible of lucid explanation. CHAPTER III DANIEL DUNGLAS HOME