Truesdell paid the customary five dollars, and received pretty and edifying, but inconclusive, messages from the spirits. Incidentally he detected that the spirit-touches on his arms were done by Slade's foot, to distract his attention; but he could not see the method of the slate-trick. However, as the main theme of the messages was an exhortation to persevere in his inquiries (at five dollars a sitting to the medium), he made another appointment. It was on this occasion that he left a misleading letter in his overcoat in Slade's hall, and found the spirits assuming that he was "Samuel Johnson, Rome, N.Y." But before Slade entered the room, or while Slade was going through his overcoat-pockets, _he_ rapidly overhauled Slade's room. He found a slate with a pious message from the spirits already written on it, signed (as was usual) by the spirit of Slade's dead wife, Alcinda. Beneath the message Truesdell wrote "Henry, look out for this fellow--he is up to snuff! Alcinda," and replaced the slate. Slade came in, and gave a most dramatic performance. In his contortions, under the spirit-influence, he drew the table near to the hidden slate, and "accidentally" knocked the clean slate off the table. Of course, he picked up the _prepared_ slate. His emotions can be imagined when he read the words which Truesdell had written on it. After a little bluster, however, he laughingly acknowledged that he was a mere conjurer, and he told Truesdell many tricks of his profession.[14] This was in 1872. Four years later Slade came to London, where Sir E. Ray Lankester and Sir Bryan Donkin again exposed him. Sir E. Ray Lankester snatched the slate before the message was supposed to be written on it, and the message was already there. He prosecuted Slade, who was sentenced to three months' hard labour. He had charged a guinea a sitter. But a few words had been omitted from the antiquated form of the charge (which I have previously given in the case of Craddock), and before Slade could be again prosecuted he fled to the continent. There, we saw, he duped a group of purblind professors, and he returned to America in higher repute than ever. In 1882 an inspector of police at Belleville, in Canada, snatched the slate just as Sir E. Ray Lankester had done, and exposed him again. He escaped arrest only by a maudlin appeal for mercy; and on his return to the States he succeeded in persuading the Spiritualists--who solemnly stated this in their organ, the _Banner of Light_--that the man exposed at Belleville was an impostor making use of his name! In 1884 he faced the Seybert Committee, and its sharp-eyed members saw and exposed every step in his trickery. Eventually, as I have said, he lived in drink and misery, developed Bright's disease, and died in the common asylum. Such was the man whom Sir A. C. Doyle seriously regards as the chosen instrument of his spiritual powers.