A working woman who was next in the little row of patients assembled in the back room, came in with her wrists bound up in bits of flannel, and her hands looking puffed and glazy. She, too, had lost the use of them for six years, she told me, and had been pronounced incurable by the doctors. This was her fourth visit to Mr. Ashman. "Take up the chair, ma'am," he said to his patient; and she did carry it in rather a wobbly fashion across the room. "Now the other hand," and she did it with the other hand. "Now show the gentleman how you did it when you came to me. She's rather hard o' hearin'," he explained to me; but after one or two repetitions the poor old body comprehended, and carried it in her crooked elbow. "Now I'll call my assistant," he said, and summoned a ruddy, red-bearded man, who looked as though he might have just come in from a brisk country walk. "When these cases require a good deal of rubbing I let my assistants do the preliminary work, and then come in as the Healing Medium myself." The rubbers, he informed me, like the Medium, must be qualified, not only physically, but morally. Benevolence was the great requisite; and certainly both these men seemed running over with it, if looks meant anything. When Joseph Ashman took his turn, working the poor old patient's stiff wrists, and pulling her fingers till they cracked, like children playing "sweethearts," she never winced, but actually seemed to like it, and trotted off well satisfied with her fourth instalment of good health. The next rubber who was introduced to me was not such a ruddy man, being, in fact, somewhat saturnine in appearance; but I could quite understand that he was, as he described himself, brimful of electricity. His chevelure was like that on the little man we stick on the conductor of an electrical machine and make each particular hair stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine. I could not for the life of me see the difference between this treatment and simple mesmerism, except that it was much more rapid in its effects than any magnetic treatment I have ever witnessed. Indeed, I frankly confess I do not understand it now, though Mr. Ashman made me accept one of his little books on Psychopathic healing, and told me I should see the distinction when I had read it. I must be very dense, for I have read it diligently through, and still fail to trace the distinction.