The truth is that here again Spiritualists had been led into their belief, that messages from the spirit-world were easy and common, by a vast amount of mediumistic trickery. The earliest method was by raps, and we have seen that since 1848 this performance has been a matter of trickery. The next way was to rap out messages with a leg of the table, which was merely a variation of the table-lifting we have studied. These forms are so often used by amateur mediums that it is necessary to recall our warning that the distinction between paid and unpaid mediums is not of the least use. Carrington, Maxwell, Podmore, and Flammarion give numbers of instances of cheating by men and women of good social position. Carrington tells of an American lawyer who deliberately--not as a joke--made his friends believe that he could make a poker stand upright and do similar abnormal phenomena. He did his tricks by means of black threads. Podmore gives a similar case in England. Flammarion tells us of a Parisian doctor's wife who cheated flagrantly in order to get credit for abnormal powers. This sort of prestige has as much fascination for some people as money has for others. The professional mediums, however, early developed in America the trick of receiving messages from spirits on slates, and this is fraud from beginning to end. The supreme artist in this field was Henry Slade, whom Sir A. C. Doyle regards as a genuine intermediary between the lofty spirits of the other world and ourselves. As Truesdell's account of the way in which he unmasked Slade as early as 1872 contains one of the richest stories in the whole collection of Spiritualist anecdotes, one would have thought that a story-teller like Sir A. C. Doyle could not possibly have forgotten it. From it we learn that Slade was from the outset of his career an adroit and brazen and confessed impostor.