287. “An opportunity was not long wanting. On the occasion of the visit of a well-known gentleman, long connected with the insane, and who never had seen any of these phenomena at the asylum, Dr. Bell invited him to go to a family where a medium of considerable power was visiting. The family was one of the most respectable of the vicinage, the head of it being a gentleman intrusted with millions of dollars of other people’s money, as the financial manager of a large banking institution. He and his wife had for some years been perfectly convinced of the spiritual character of these manifestations. The medium was a young lady of eighteen or twenty, of very slight figure, weighing eighty or ninety pounds, and had discovered herself to be a _medium_ while on a visit to these distant relatives. A family, from character and position, more entirely beyond the suspicion of even winking at any thing like fraud or irregularity, does not exist in the world. They were so fortunate as to find the medium at home, and the circle was made of the five persons mentioned. The ordinary manifestations of raps, beating of musical tunes, and responses to mental and spoken questions, were very completely presented, as well as the movements of the table under the mere contact of fingers’ ends. Finding that things appeared very favourable to a full exhibition of what he wished to see, as evinced by the very facile movements of the table under contact, Dr. Bell proposed trying the grand _experimentum crucis_ of the physical manifestations—the movement of the table without any human contact, direct or indirect. He was permitted to arrange things to suit himself, and began by opening the table more widely, and inserting two movable table-leaves, which increased the length from about six to perhaps nine or ten feet. This, he felt, also gave him an opportunity to see and upset all wires and mechanism concealed, or, at least, to answer positively as to their non-existence. The table was a solid structure of black walnut, with six carved legs, the whole of such a weight that when the castors were all in the right line of motion, he could just start it by the full grasp of the thumb and fingers of both hands. 288. “The persons stood on the _sides_ of the table, three and two, and back from its edge about eighteen inches. As Dr. Bell is some six feet two inches in height, he averred that he had no difficulty in seeing _between_ the table and the persons of all present. The hands were raised over it at about the same height, of a foot and a half.