If you go to a department store and ask for a well advertised bit of merchandise and when you get home you find the clerk has substituted “something just as good” you either report the clerk to the management or else you do not patronize the store again; if you go to a tailor and he sells you an “all-wool” suit and you find that most of the “wool” grew on cotton plants you pass that store by when you are ready to buy another suit; if you catch your best friend cheating at cards you refuse to play with him again ever and a life-time friendship is broken up. But Palladino cheated at Cambridge, she cheated in l’Aguélas, and she cheated in New York and yet each time that she was caught cheating the Spiritualists upheld her, excused her, and forgave her. Truly their logic sometimes borders on the humorous. F. W. H. Myers wrote in “Borderland” in 1896: “These frauds were practiced in and out of the real, or alleged, trance and were so skillfully executed that the poor woman must have practiced them long and carefully.” Palladino is summed up in these few lines. My opinion is that Palladino in her crafty prime may have possessed the agility and abundant skill in misdirection together with sufficient energy and nerve to bamboozle[56] her scientific and otherwise astute committeemen, but as time demanded its toll she probably lost her vim and nerve and became unable to present her “performances” with the success that attended her earlier demonstrations. My old friend, John William Sargent, who died on September 24, 1920, was one of the committee which finally dethroned Palladino, and I believe it no more than just that the last word of this chapter should be said by him. “Eusapia Palladino is dead and I have little doubt that she departed hence without forgiving me for the part I took in spoiling her business in America by assisting in the exposure of her little bag of tricks. It is an open question, however, whether the exposure of her trickery, or in fact of any of the class of sensation mongers to which she belonged, ever turned a soul from belief in Spiritism; some of the leading newspapers, in commenting on her death, show that in spite of the complete exposure of her methods, there still remains in the minds of many intelligent people the conviction that she was far from an impostor. I cannot understand how any reasonable person could see in this woman anything more than a fairly clever charlatan, whose success was due more to the credulity of her audiences than the skill of her performances. What did all her exposures amount to? Those who believed have continued to believe, and in spite of the old saw, ‘Truth is mighty and must prevail,’ the name of Eusapia Palladino will be on the lips of men long, long after her exposers are forgotten dust.” CHAPTER V ANN O’DELIA DISS DEBAR