It was quite childish. It is just by learning such out-of-the-way facts, as they easily can, and making use of them, that the mediums keep up their reputations. There was no reason whatever why the medium should not have learned of the death and made so profitable a use of it. Stainton Moses often did such things. One day he was possessed by the spirit of a cabman who said that he had been killed on the streets of London that very afternoon. By an unusual oversight the spirit did not give his name. It was afterwards found that the accident was reported in an evening paper which Stainton Moses _might_ have seen just before the séance; and, by a curious coincidence, the reporter had not given the cabman's name. In other cases, where mediums had been invited to districts with which they were not familiar, yet they gave quite accurate details about local dead, it was found on inquiry that the information _might_ have been gathered from the stones in the local cemetery. A common retort of the Spiritualist, when you point out the possibility of the medium impersonating the dead, is that, "if she did so, she must be one of the cleverest actresses in England." You are asked, triumphantly, why the lady should be content with a few pounds a week as a despised medium, when she might be making five thousand a year on a stage. Any person who has seen these "trances" will know the value of their "dramatic" art. Almost anybody could do it. The medium makes from three to five pounds a week by such things, but if she tried the stage she would have, at the most, a minor part with fifty or sixty pounds a year. Spiritualists get their judgments weirdly distorted by their bias. I need only quote the extravagant language in which Sir A. C. Doyle refers to Mr. Vale Owen's trash or Mrs. Spencer's picture of Christ. He makes the miracle in which he wishes to believe. Two particular cases of spirit messages by automatic writing have lately been pressed upon us, and we must briefly examine them. One is given in a book by Mr. F. Bligh Bond, called _The Gate of Remembrance_, which is recommended to us by Sir A. C. Doyle as one of the five particularly convincing works which he would have us read. He again fails to tell his readers that Mr. Bligh Bond draws a very different conclusion than his own from the facts. He has a mystical theory of a universal memory or consciousness, a sort of ocean into which the memories of the dead have flowed. He does not believe that the individual spirits of the dead monks of pre-Reformation days came along and dictated their views through his automatic-writing friend.