One young man, in deep mourning, with a little girl also in black, of
about five or six years old, attracted my attention at once, from his
sorrowful and abstracted manner. He had evidently come there, I thought,
in the hope of seeing some one whom he had lost. Mrs. Fay (as she passed
through the room to her cabinet) appeared a very quiet, simple-looking
little woman to me, without any loudness or vulgarity about her. Her
cabinet was composed of two curtains only, made of some white material,
and hung on uprights at one angle, in a corner of the room, the most
transparent contrivance possible. Anything like a bustle or confusion
inside it, such as would be occasioned by dressing or "making up,"
would have been apparent at once to the audience outside, who were
sitting by the light of an ordinary gas-burner and globe. Yet Mrs. Fay
had not been seated there above a few minutes, when there ran out into
the _séance_ room two of the most extraordinary materializations I had
ever seen, and both of them about as opposite to Mrs. Fay in appearance
as any creatures could be.
One was an Irish charwoman or apple-woman (she might have been either)
with a brown, wrinkled face, a broken nose, tangled grey hair, a crushed
bonnet, general dirt and disorder, and a tongue that could talk broad
Irish, and call "a spade a spade" at one and the same time. "Biddy," as
she was named, was accompanied by a street newspaper boy--one of those
urchins who run after carriages and turn Catherine-wheels in the mud,
and who talked "gutter-slang" in a style that was utterly unintelligible
to the decent portion of the sitters. These two went on in a manner that
was undoubtedly funny, but not at all edifying and calculated to drive
any enquirer into Spiritualism out of the room, under the impression
that they were evil spirits bent on our destruction. That either of them
was represented by Mrs. Fay was out of the question. In the first place,
she would, in that instance, have been so clever an actress and mimic,
that she would have made her fortune on the stage--added to which the
boy "Teddy" was much too small for her, and "Biddy" was much too large.
Besides, no actress, however experienced, could have "made up" in the
time. I was quite satisfied, therefore, that neither of them was the
medium, even if I could not have seen her figure the while, through the
thin curtains, sitting in her chair. _Why_ such low, physical
manifestations are permitted I am unable to say. It was no wonder they
had shocked the sensibility of my friend. I felt half inclined myself
when they appeared to get up and run away. However, I was very glad
afterwards that I did not. They disappeared after a while, and were
succeeded by a much pleasanter person, a cabinet spirit called "Gipsy,"
who looked as if she might have belonged to one of the gipsy tribes when
on earth, she was so brown and arch and lively. Presently the young man
in black was called up, and I saw him talking to a female spirit very
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