various dresses I have described above, and became quite a marked figure in the city. When it was made known through the papers that an old friend of Florence Marryat had appeared through the mediumship of Virginia Roberts, in a uniform of thirty years before, I received numbers of private letters inquiring if it were true, and dozens of people visited Miss Roberts' _séances_ for the sole purpose of seeing him. He took a great liking for Mrs. S----, and when she had conquered her first fear she became quite friendly with him, and I heard, after leaving New York, that he continued to appear for her as long as she attended those _séances_. There was one difference in the female spirits that came through Virginia Roberts from those of other media. Those that were strong enough to leave the cabinet invariably disappeared by floating upwards through the ceiling. Their mode of doing this was most graceful. They would first clasp their hands behind their heads and lean backward; then their feet were lifted off the ground, and they were borne upward in a recumbent position. When I related this to my friend, Dr. George Lefferts (under whom I was for throat treatment to recover my voice), he declared there must be some machinery connected with the uprights that supported the cabinet, by which the forms were elevated. He had got it all so "pat" that he was able to take a pencil and demonstrate to me on paper exactly how the machinery worked, and how easy it would be to swing full-sized human bodies up to the ceiling with it. How they managed to disappear when they got there he was not quite prepared to say; but if he once saw the trick done, he would explain the whole matter to me, and expose it into the bargain. I told Dr. Lefferts, as I have told many other clever men, that I shall be the first person open to conviction when they can convince me, and I bore him off to a private _séance_ with Virginia Roberts for that purpose only. He was all that was charming on the occasion. He gave me a most delightful dinner at Delmonico's first (for which I tender him in print my grateful recollection), and he tested all Miss Roberts' manifestations in the most delicate and gentlemanly manner (sceptics as a rule are neither delicate nor gentlemanly), but he could neither open my eyes to chicanery nor detect it himself. He handled and shook the frail supports of the cabinet, and confessed they were much too weak to bear any such weight as he had imagined. He searched the carpeted floor and the adjoining room for hidden machinery without finding the slightest thing to rouse his suspicions, and yet he saw the female forms float upwards through the whitewashed ceiling, and came away from the _séance_ room as wise as when he had entered it.