"My left-hand neighbour was an elderly woman in black, who looked like a spinster, and who, instead of the bonnet of everyday life, wore a rusty Spanish mantilla, and a black velvet band across her high narrow forehead, confining braids of chestnut hair whose artificial origin was patent to every eye. As the _séance_ progressed she frequently shed tears. Mrs. Ravenshaw, who was in her confidence, whispered to me that this lady came there to hold mystic converse with an officer in the East-India Company's Service, to whom she had been betrothed thirty years before, and who had died in Bengal, after marrying the daughter of a native money-lender and an English governess. It comforted his devoted sweetheart to hear from his own lips, as it were, that he had led a wretched existence with his half-caste wife, and had never ceased to repent his inconstancy to his dearest Amanda. Amanda was the name of the lady in the mantilla, Amanda Jones. It amuses me to recall these details, to dwell upon the opening of a scene which I entered upon so casually, and which was to exercise so lasting an influence upon my life. "The _séance_ proceeded after the vulgar routine of such mysteries in England and in America. We sat in the frowzy darkness, and heard each other's breathing as we listened to the mysterious rappings, now here, now there, now high, now low, as of some sportive dressmaker rapping her thimbled finger on table, or shutter, or ceiling, or wall. We heard strange messages thumped out, or throbbed out by the excitable mahogany, which became more and more vehement, as if the beating of our hearts, the swift current of blood in all our arteries were being gradually absorbed by that vitalised wood. The German woman translated the rappings into strange scraps of speech, which for some of the audience were full of meaning--private communications from friends long dead, allusions to the past, which were sometimes received in blank wonder, sometimes welcomed as proof irresistible of thought-transference between the dead and the living. The mighty dead, with names familiar to us all, condescended to hold communion with us. Spinosa, Bacon, Shelley, Sir John Franklin, Mesmer--a strange mixture of personalities--but, alas! the feebleness of their communications gave a crushing blow to the theory of a progressive existence beyond the grave. "'I should like to know how it's done,' said the sea-captain, suddenly, in an aggressive voice, which irreverent interruption the professor and some of the audience rebuked by an indignant hush.