You can readily understand that the daily papers, both morning and evening, were going strong on this murder, giving the public all the sensational stuff they could rake out of the gory mess. Even wild rumor was sufficiently tamed to occupy a place of honor on first pages, no least item of the appalling affair being too inconsequent to be written up until it fairly bristled with significance. Even at that, very little attention was given to a press dispatch from Montreal which appeared in the Boston papers on the second morning after the shooting. Only a few lines it amounted to, and tacked on at the end of one of the columns devoted to the murder. This dispatch stated as rather a striking coincidence, that one of the Montreal papers of the day before—that is, of the morning following the West Roxbury shooting—had printed in a local news column a short paragraph to the effect that at a spirit séance in a private house on Sackville Street the night before—which was the evening of the murder, a call had come from the spirit of some one (a man it seemed to be) whose name, owing to his extreme agitation, couldn’t be obtained, but who was so insistent on speaking that the control brought him in. The medium, who was in trance, suddenly taken by this spirit, began crying out: “Stop them! Stop them! Can’t somebody stop them? Oh, it’s terrible—terrible! They’re going right on—there’s no help for it! Oh—can’t somebody telegraph?” Then there was a pause, and some of the sitters began asking this spirit what the trouble was, and where he wanted them to telegraph, and what his name was, and things like that. But there was no answer, and for several minutes nothing more came through. Then suddenly there was something like a shout for help repeated several times and followed by wild exclamations about killing some one. “Down in the States—down in the States! Roxbury—down in the States! They’re killing a man in Roxbury—killing a man. No one can stop it now! There’s a gun aimed at him—don’t you understand—aiming a gun—aiming a——Oh, They’ve shot him!... Now they’ve shot him again!... He’s sinking—sinking down—down.... Now he’s on the floor—all in a heap!... Now he’s dead!... Dead!... Dead...!” The words seemed to trail off in the distance toward the end, and nothing more was heard from the perturbed visitor. The Montreal paper carrying the account of this went on to say that its information was obtained from a well-known person who had attended the sitting. And one of the Boston papers, commenting on it briefly, as one of those odd coincidences which come along and surprise us every now and then, added: “This will be less astounding, however, when we reflect that a medium in Canada or anywhere else can confidently assert, at any hour of the day or night, that a murder is being committed in one of the large cities of the United States, and not be far out of the way in time or place.”