belief that he had been the writer of bulletins for some newspaper during the late Southern conflict. And this assumed spirit would pass himself off as a deceased member of my family, staggering me with his knowledge, and from which bewilderment I confess I can find no present means of rational escape. I have, however, come pretty nearly to the conclusion that the spirit, or whatever it is, that I have alluded to above, has been our only visitor; but the imagination cannot conceive a scheme so subtle as his has been to deceive us into the belief that those persons, whose character he pretended to represent, were in fact the very individuals themselves; and under ordinary circumstances few men could have been blamed had they been credulous of his representations. I have frequently tried by the most determined exercise of will, to force the responses into the channel I had mentally prepared for them; but in no case, I must candidly confess, could I command obedience. This fact shook my theory of sympathetic influence, and settled in that small sphere of experiment the vexed question of the power of mind to operate upon matter. My friend, who has the mediumistic faculty, made similar attempts, and always with like result. Let wiser heads than mine unravel and explain, by cogent and irresistible logic, these eccentric incidents, for I must admit my utter inability to explain them by any rules outside of those adopted by the spiritualist. But though I may have been a witness of these phenomena, it does not follow that I am a spiritualist, any more than I am of the mythological faith of pagan Greece, because, forsooth, I take delight in the statue of Minerva, go into raptures over that of Venus, and read with unfeigned enjoyment the poems of that prince of old idolaters, blind but immortal Homer. I have before me a package of manuscript purporting to have been written by inhabitants of another world,—by hands that have felt the pressure of the hand of death, and yet, it would seem, are able to express thought with the intelligence usually attributed to life. One of these communications purports to have been written by Isabella Joyce, the murdered girl, and another by her father, Stephen Joyce. The manuscript of the girl strikes me as of a better order of chirography than is usually to be found in that of children of her age; while the father’s is large and roughly emphatic, and bears the impress of a passionate desire to discover the murderer and avenge the deaths of his children. Friends of Stephen Joyce assert that the formation of the writing is unmistakably similar to his; but, as I have not been able to compare the dead man’s penmanship with anything done by him while on earth, I cannot pass judgment either of denial or verification.