We have just had a couple of professional “mediums” in the police courts, and it is to be heartily hoped that all their colleagues of any notoriety will soon be submitted to the same searching test, and duly rewarded according to their merits. At Huddersfield the Rev. Francis Ward Monck, formerly a minister at Bristol, was cleverly caught out by Mr. Lodge, a woollen merchant and amateur conjurer, who at the close of a private seance offered to do all the “Doctor” had done, and insisted on seeing his “paraphernalia.” The Doctor protested with profuse virtuous indignation, but his detecter was firm. At length this reverend medium took refuge in his own bedroom and locked himself in, and while the profane sceptics were besieging the door he managed to escape from the window by the help of a sheet. In his sore haste he left behind him some of the “paraphernalia,” whose existence he had so indignantly denied, including “spirit hands” and prepared musical boxes. He took out a warrant against Mr. Lodge for the recovery of these precious articles, and was met by a counter-warrant issued by the chief constable under the Vagrant Act, for using subtle craft means and devices to deceive and impose on certain of her Majesty’s subjects; he being charged with thus defrauding one person of £20, while Mr. Heppleston, a general dealer, in whose house the exposure took place, had paid him £4 for two séances, the prisoner assuring him that the manifestations were genuine, and were produced by spiritual agency. The prisoner’s solicitor said that the Vagrant Act did not apply to a gentleman in the position of Dr. Monck, who kept his carriage and yacht at Bristol. We may admit that the application of the Vagrant Act is an awkward and round-about mode of dealing with such cases, and the sooner Parliament in its great wisdom provides a more direct and effectual remedy, the better; nor could a stronger argument for its provisions be adduced than the fact, if fact it be, that this reverend medium by the illicit production of spirits very much below proof, has been getting money enough to keep a carriage and yacht. When the Huddersfield magistrates remanded him for a week at the request of the chief constable, offering to accept bail, himself in £250, and two sureties in £100 each, the bail was not forthcoming; and the prisoner made a high-minded and pathetic appeal to the bench, “asking them not to make him suffer the indignity of incarceration in the police-cells; he said he had forsaken everything to follow this calling, believing in his inmost soul that it was right.” So far as I can see, a convicted burglar or manufacturer of counterfeit coin, might with as good reason make just such an appeal; pleading pathetically that he had forsaken everything to follow this calling, affirming nobly that he believed in his inmost soul that it was right; while as to the jemmy and the skeleton keys, or the moulds and the battery, which had been