"We waited nearly an hour in all--we had arrived half an hour before the stated opening of the _séance_, and we waited five and twenty minutes more, and were yawning and fidgeting hopelessly before the door opened, and a dismal-looking man with a pallid face and long hair, came into the room, followed by a slovenly woman in black, with bare arms, and a towzled, highly artistic flaxen head. He bowed solemnly to the assembled company, looked from the company to the woman, and murmured in a sepulchral voice, 'My wife,' by way of general introduction. "The flaxen-headed lady seated herself at the large round table, and the dark-haired vampire-like man crept about the room inviting his audience to take their places at the same mystic table. We formed a circle, hand touching hand, the long-haired professor on one side of the table, the flaxen wife on the other. Gerald and I were separated by the width of the table, and the enthusiastic novelist and her practical husband were also as far apart as circumstances would permit. "My next neighbour on the right was a tall, burly man with a strong North of Ireland accent, a captain in the mercantile marine, Mrs. Ravenshaw informed me. The people who met in this dreary room had come by some knowledge of one another's social status and opinions, although conversation was sternly discouraged as offensive to the impalpable company we were there to cultivate. A gloomy silence, and a vaguely uncomfortable expectancy of something ghastly were the prevailing characteristics of the assembly. "Mrs. Ravenshaw had informed me that the seaman on my right was an unbeliever, and that he courted the spirits only with the malicious desire of doing them a bad turn. There had been the premonitory symptoms of a row on more than one occasion, and he had been the source and centre of the adverse feeling which had shown itself at those times.