He was certainly under the impression that he could be trusted to recognise his own daughter when allowed the privilege of half-an-hour's conversation with her, _tete-a-tete_ in a private room. I cannot end this chapter without saying something about Keely of Philadelphia and his intuitional genius. I had hoped to have the opportunity of meeting this wonderful man during my last stay in Philadelphia, U.S.A. (March 1897), but was disappointed in this expectation. Therefore, on the outer plane, my connection with Keely never went beyond a single interview with his wife; but this is a record of personal intuitions as well as of personal events, and I know no one with regard to whom my intuitions--absolutely lacking in any physical ground of proof, or even mental ground of comprehension--have been stronger or more obstinate. At the time of my first visit to America, so far back as 1885, I had not the faintest conception of Keely's work, or what he claimed to have discovered or to be on the track of discovering. I never heard his name mentioned without being told at the same time that he was either a silly madman or a conscious impostor, and as I came with an entirely unprejudiced mind (for I had never heard of Keely before landing in America), it would have been natural to accept this universal opinion. Yet something stronger than reason was always silently contradicting these assertions, when made in my presence. Friends and acquaintances alike in those days laughed at Keely's claims, and denounced his boasted discovery as pure imposture. "'Tisn't! 'Tisn't! 'Tisn't!" that persistent little voice kept whispering in my ear all the time, like a naughty, obstinate child who contradicts from sheer ignorance--or was it a spiritual intuition? Time alone can answer that question; anyway, I kept my ideas to myself, for they had no foundation in fact at the time of which I speak. In 1897 the position for me was altered. A sensible and dependable friend of mine--a well-known banker in Philadelphia--described to me his experiences and those of other prominent citizens during a demonstration of Mr Keely's powers; and the old insistent voice that spoke to my ignorance before, spoke now to some glimmering understanding of the claim put forth. This claim--even then jeered at by the world at large--had to wait shivering in the cold another nine years, before Mr Frederic Soddy clothed it in respectable scientific garb by speaking publicly of the possibilities in the future connected with atomic disintegration and consequent liberation of energy. But the yelping curs of Calumny that pursued Keely during his lifetime are still upon the dead man's tracks. "_His_ methods were fraud and imposture, anyway"; "His wires were tubes containing compressed air," and so forth. The M.F.H. of this pack of hounds was the son of a lady whose name will always be honourably mentioned with that of Keely as one of his most generous supporters.