"I shan't," replied "Dewdrop," drawing the dish towards her; "I like apples. I'm always wanting 'Medy' to eat them, and she won't, so she must go away till I've had as many as I want." And in effect she ate three or four of them, and Bessie would never have been cognizant of the fact unless I had informed her. On the occasion of the party to which she came uninvited, "Dewdrop" remained with us to the very last, and went home in a cab, and landed Mrs. Fitzgerald at her house without her being aware that she had ever left it. At that time we were constantly at each other's houses, and many an evening have I spent alone with Bessie in the Goldhawk Road, her servant out marketing and her little children asleep in the room overhead. Her baby was then a great fat fellow of about fifteen months old, who was given to waking and crying for his mother. If "Dewdrop" were present, she was always very impatient with these interruptions. "Bother dat George," she would say; "I must go up and quiet him." Then she would disappear for a few minutes, while Bessie woke and talked to me, and then, in the twinkling of an eye, "Dewdrop" would be back again. One day, apparently, "George" would not be comforted, for on "Dewdrop's" return she said to me, "It's no good; I've had to bring him down. He's on the mat outside the door;" and there, sure enough, we found the poor baby wailing in his nightshirt. Not being able to walk, how he had been spirited from the top storey to the bottom I leave my readers to determine. Bessie's little girl Mabel promised to be as wonderful a medium as her mother. She would come in from the garden flushed from her play with the "spirit-children," of whom she talked as familiarly as of her little neighbors next door. I have watched her playing at ball with an invisible child, and have seen the ball thrown, arrested half-way in the air, and then tossed back again just as if a living child had been Mab's opponent. I had lost several infants from premature birth during my second marriage, and the eldest of these, a girl, appeared to be a constant companion of Mabel's. She was always talking of what "Mrs. Lean's girl" (as she called her) had done and said; and one day she had a violent fit of weeping because her mother would not promise to buy her a frock like the one "Mrs. Lean's girl" wore.