In those years a mechanic named Marshall, while building a saw-mill for Captain Sutter in California, had noticed a glistening substance at the bottom of the sluice. Thence the beginning of the great exodus from the old States, which soon peopled the auriferous region, and in five years made San Francisco one of the world’s great cities. In those years the phenomena, by some called spiritual, of which our friend Peek had got an inkling, excited the attention of many thousand thinkers both in America and Europe. In France these manifestations attracted the investigation of the Emperor himself, and won many influential believers, among them Delamarre, editor of La Patrie. In England they found advocates among a small but educated class; while the Queen’s consort, the good and great Prince Albert, was too far advanced on the same road to find even novelty in what Swedenborg and Wesley had long before prepared him to regard as among the irregular developments of spirit power. “Humbug and idiocy!” cried the doctors. “A cracking of the toe-joints!” said Conjurer Anderson. “A scientific trick!” insisted Professor Faraday. “Spirits are the last thing I’ll give into,” said Sir David Brewster. “O ye miserable mystics!” cried the eloquent Ferrier, “have ye bethought yourselves of the backward and downward course which ye are running into the pit of the bestial and the abhorred?” “How very undignified for a spirit to rap on tables and talk commonplace!” objected the transcendentalists, who looked for Orphic sayings and Delphian profundities.