"Alas!" exclaims Nathaniel Hawthorne in "The Blythedale Romance," "methinks we have fallen on an evil age! If these phenomena have not humbug at the bottom, so much the worse for us. What can they indicate in a spiritual way, except that the soul of man is descending to a lower point that it has ever reached while incarnate? We are pursuing a downward course in the eternal march, and thus bring ourselves into the same range with beings whom death--in requital of their gross and evil lives--has degraded below humanity. To hold intercourse with spirits of this order, we must stoop and grovel in some elements more vile than earthly dust. These goblins, if they exist at all, are but the shadows of past mortality--mere refuse stuff, adjudged unworthy of the eternal world, and as the most favorable supposition, dwindling gradually into nothingness. The less we have to say to them, the better, lest we share their fate." CHAPTER XII. A SCIENTIFIC JURY. At one period of her strange career, Mrs. Kane entered the service of Mr. Henry Seybert, the famous and wealthy spiritualist of Philadelphia, who proposed to found what he called a "Spiritual Mansion." Mrs. Kane's salary and appointments were liberal, and her situation was one which would have met the fondest wishes of many noted and ambitious "mediums." She was the high priestess of this new temple of the unseen entities, and as such she was honored and treated with most exalted respect. The conditions of the "Spiritual Mansion" were in all respects favorable to the intercourse of dwellers in the flesh with those who inhabit the realm of shadows, if such there had been. The taking up of her abode in this singular institution was one of her earliest steps, after the throwing off of her deep weeds of mourning, worn in memory of the untimely termination of her dream of happiness. It was then that she found that the professional life of a "medium" was the only refuge left her from the cruel pursuit of poverty and want. But her stay in the "Spiritual Mansion" was short. She had thought that the quiet existence afforded her there would be preferable to the daily and distasteful practice of public "mediumship," which she must have resorted to at once, had she not accepted the proposition of Mr. Seybert. But the hypocrisy unconsciously required of her by him, while of a more fantastic description, was altogether too much for her to endure. Her intense hatred of her profession as a "medium" appeared in a strong light to those who were then in her confidence. Mrs. Kane, at the "Spiritual Mansion," not only produced pretended messages from the departed friends of her patron, but also from nearly every martyr and saint in the Protestant calendar, and from the famous sages and rulers of old. But her imposture stopped short of actual sacrilege. Beyond that line she never has gone.