One evening (in Ludlow Place) so severe a storm was raging, and it was so bitterly cold, that I had no fear of any visitors coming in, and had settled myself for comfort in the basement room, and allowed the fire in the parlor to go out. But the bell rang, and Susie announced a party of four or five gentlemen. They had been brought by one of my good friends from the St. Nicholas Hotel. They were all Southerners; and one of them, an old gentleman, had been seduced out to go with the party to "some place of entertainment," without knowing what or where. (He was bitterly prejudiced against Spiritualism and us.) When he got in and learned into what he had been entrapped, he was very angry, and refused to pay his dollar or to go any farther. Susie reported that he was up in the hall, and their hack had been dismissed. I sent word to invite him down to the warm room, unless he chose to remain out in the cold, for which I should be sorry. He finally came down, but sat apart in a corner of the room as distant as possible from the group of us gathered round the table near the fire. He was, as I afterward learned, an old man now left alone in the world with his wealth; a large family having been swept away from him, chiefly by yellow fever. He replied somewhat gruffly to my invitation to him to draw up to the fire, and my friend scratched a few lines to me telling me to take no notice further as he was a sceptic, and very angry at the trick they had played upon him. Before long came some raps, saying, "Father, do come to the table and get warm," signed with the names of his wife and a number of his children: and they happened to be rather unusual names, of which I remember only Tabitha, Rebecca, and Sarah. As one after another he heard them rapped out, he turned in his seat and became evidently excited and affected, and even tears began to stream down his aged face. He came to the table, where he received such satisfaction that his long-lost dead were really there and speaking to him, that when the party broke up he expressed great gratitude; and said that though he had refused to pay his dollar, he insisted on my acceptance of the $20 bill which he laid on the table.