One of these tricksters, practising in New York, lately came to grief in a curious way. Prudently dispensing with the paraphernalia usually affected by the craft, Medium Flint adopted a simpler and less risky method of swindling, merely undertaking for a fee of two dollars to act as a medium of communication between his patrons and their friends in the spirit-world. Any one desirous of obtaining news or advice from that mysterious debatable land had only to send him a letter addressed to a spirit and securely fastened; unless that were done, it would not be answered; Flint's agency being only efficient when his mind was blank and passive to both questions and answers, and delivering in his own handwriting simply and precisely what was dictated to him by the spirit communicating. Of course the recipients of these proxy-written spirit-replies never doubted their genuineness, especially as they came accompanied with their own epistles with their covers _intact_. Unfortunately for himself, Mr Flint gave his wife--'a spiritualist herself, but not of the same kind as her husband'--good cause to leave his house; and the abused lady carried away with her not only the little apparatus by whose aid he unsealed the communications of his dupes, but the book in which the rascal copied them and the answers he manufactured; and to make matters worse for the unlucky medium, Mrs Flint thought proper to publish a selection from his correspondence, 'to warn people against quack spiritualists,' and serve for the entertainment of all not concerned. It serves to shew too how widespread the belief in spiritualism is in the States; for Flint's customers are of all grades, from the humble individual whose highest ambition is to occupy a clerk's stool, to an ambassador-elect, anxious to settle a doubtful point respecting his pedigree, before leaving his country to represent it at the Court of St James.