Experience taught me to adopt a rule not to give private séances to single strangers, but rather to only two or more at a time. This was not so much as a safeguard against personal impertinences (for such things were of rare occurrence, and never repeated), but under the advice of my Spirit friends, to afford some protection against malignant enemies who might come (as had happened) under a mask of friendly interest and honest investigation, and then, when unchecked by the presence of another witness, give calumnious accounts of their private séances. I might cite some curious instances of this. But I should have but few instances to tell of personal impertinence ever having been addressed to me, though thus living a life which constantly afforded to promiscuous strangers the free admission to the presence of myself and my young sisters, protected only by their dignity and their noble mother's presence. I will mention but one, which occurred in an Eastern city, in 1857, the hero of which was an important man who had inherited from a far nobler father one of the greatest names known to our history. The incident occurred neither in New York nor in Washington, but to name the city would go far to identify the person. Five gentlemen were announced at one of my public hours, of whom one was evidently the most prominent man, and a sort of leader of the company. A glance sufficed to show that he was considerably intoxicated, and that some of his companions had had more or less share in the conviviality which had preceded their visits to the "Spirits" of a different kind. He is no longer in this life, but some of the rest doubtless survive, and are not likely to have forgotten the occasion when they had to retire ignominiously from my rooms at a hotel. * * * * * Naturally during the years thus spent in the exercise of my mediumship in New York, I became acquainted with no small number of domestic and family affairs of the most delicate--sometimes the most painful--character. In the private séances so often solicited by visitors there would arise, in their communication with Spirits, revelations of secrets the existence of which was little suspected by the outside world, and which, with me, were under no less absolute and sacred a sanction of secresy than in the Catholic confessional, or the confidential relations of the medical man. And it is a happiness for me to know that, apart from the communications received by visitors from their Spirit friends, I have many a time and oft had the opportunity of exerting useful influences on the minds of some whose inmost hearts and lives have thus been laid open before a sympathetic and sisterly eye. * * * * * DISCOMFITURE OF ANDERSON, "THE WIZARD OF THE NORTH."