Vaucluse, originally laid out by a French landscape architect, was in those days the finest country seat I had ever seen, although already a good deal fallen from its high estate and not maintained as it should have been. The remains of a labyrinth could still be traced by the windings of its box-bordered paths. The long alley leading to the summerhouse was bordered by a neglected box hedge higher than a man’s head. The trees here seemed larger and handsomer than all other oaks, elms, or maples, and in the month of May two superb specimens of _Magnolia grandiflora_ were covered with enormous creamy white blossoms, whose perfume haunts me still. The house was of colonial design, with very large white columns at the entrance of the main building, flanked by two wings used in the olden time as servants’ quarters, but now devoted to seeds and bulbs and all sorts of quaint garden tools. Before the entrance a graveled path swept round a circle of greensward, in whose midst stood the old lichen-covered sundial, clasped by a scarlet honeysuckle. It was here one breathless midsummer afternoon that we gave the memorable amateur circus. As the crowning event, Sultan, the Mayers’ old Arabian pony, trotted round and round the ring, while Esther Hazard, in a blue bathing suit and scarlet cap, balanced lightly on his venerable back! Mr. Hazard was a confirmed spiritualist. He read “The Banner of Light”, if, indeed, he did not contribute to that journal, then the chief organ of the spiritualists. I often went with him to _séances_, which had a great interest for me, though I was never for a moment shaken in my belief that the manifestations and materializations I witnessed were vulgar shams. Fannie Hazard, the eldest daughter, a girl of great sweetness and a good deal of will power, refused to allow mediums at Vaucluse; I remember some battles royal on this point. After her death, however, the mediums came, and a cabinet was arranged in one of the summerhouses, where the _séances_ took place. Once Frederick Myers of the London Society for Psychical Research was present with me at a _séance_. The medium was a dull one, the grossness of her manifestations, it seemed to me, could not deceive the veriest child. They deceived Mr. Myer, however, who was deeply impressed with all that he saw and heard. Later, when I read accounts of the impartial manner in which the investigations of psychical phenomena were carried on by the society of which Frederick Myer was the leading spirit, the testimony left me quite cold.