In this class of things, cheatings and hoaxings are as numerous as authenticated facts. Those who are curious in such things will not have forgotten the scandalous hoax and misdemeanor of the celebrated Mrs. Williams, an American woman who was received in full confidence, in 1894, in Paris, by my excellent friend, the Duchess of Pomar. Already made distrustful by the ingenious observations of the young duke, the sitters were determined not to be the butt of her fooleries very long, and a sitting was agreed on. The participators were MM. de Watteville, Dariex, Mangin, Ribero, Wellemberg, Lebel, Wolf, Paul Leymarie (son of the editor of _La Revue Spirite_), etc. The specialty of Mrs. Williams (who was, by the way, quite a stout person) was the showing of apparitions, or ghosts. Said apparitions proved to be manikins, rather poorly got up; the lady spectators, as well as the gentlemen, were quite disappointed at the absence of the rich and flowing outlines of _form_ under the draperies of the wretched puppets. Thin and limp, tatterdemalion things, they showed not the faintest resemblance to the normal and classic contours of woman, the lines of which we should have been able to glimpse at least to some extent under the light gauze that enwrapped the figures. Several bright-witted, but rather irreverent, ladies took no pains to conceal the fact that they should prefer annihilation if it were necessary to be so ... "reduced," so "incomplete" in the other world! The gentlemen added that they would certainly not be alone in lamenting such a state of things! There was no religious atmosphere at all about these sittings. The imposture was discovered, or, one might rather say, seized, by M. Paul Leymarie. He simply grasps Mme. Impostor around the waist (having slipped behind the curtain for the purpose), and holds her fast for the inspection of the audience. Lights are brought on, and, in the midst of the confused uproar made by twenty-five duped sitters, the heroine of the entertainment is compelled to show herself in flesh tights, while the whole apparatus of her ghostly puppet-show is discovered in the cabinet! Mrs. Williams had the effrontery to defend herself, a little later, in the American Journal _Light_, bestowing the playful epithet of "bandits" upon those who had unmasked her in Paris. That was a case of high mystification, of jugglery worthy of a street-corner mountebank. But, as we have already seen, matters do not usually attain to such a height of audacity, and quite often fraud only intervenes when the genuine powers have become enfeebled. This well appeared in the accounts of the "girl torpedo-fish," Angelica Cottin, who attained a good deal of notoriety.