Kirkup’s conversion to spiritualism was so complete that, as I have said, his entire life was shaped according to the dictates which Miss Imogene chose to represent as coming from her spiritual visitors. The old man had lived for very many years in Florence. All the interests which still bound him to life were there, and he was much attached to the city in which so large a portion of his long life had been passed. But Imogene one day announced that “the spirits” declared that he must go and live in Leghorn! Of course the blow to the old man was a terrible one, but he meekly and unhesitatingly obeyed, and submitted to be uprooted when he was past eighty and packed off to Leghorn! I discovered subsequently--what I might have guessed at the time--that the good-for-nothing jade had a lover at Leghorn. Kirkup’s new faith in the existence of a soul in man, separable from his body, continued firm, I believe, till his death, which occurred shortly afterwards. I have at various times and in various countries been present at the performances of spiritualistic _mediums_ (a monstrous word, but one can’t write _media_), and always with an uniformly similar result in one respect. No non-material experience whatever has ever been vouchsafed to me myself. _Material_ phenomena of a very surprising nature, and altogether unaccountable in accordance with any received physical theories, I have seen in great abundance. And I must in justice say that the performances of Messrs. Maskelyne and Cooke, which attracted so much attention in Piccadilly, masterly as they were as exhibitions of legerdemain, did not by any means succeed in proving the imposture of the pretensions of Hume and others, by doing the same things. I think the Piccadilly performances _did_ achieve this as regards the tying and loosening of knots in a dark cabinet. But when one of the performers above mentioned proceeded to “float in the air,” he only demonstrated the impossibility of doing by any means known to his art, that which Hume--or Home--was declared on the most indisputable testimony to have done. Mr. Maskelyne certainly “floated in the air” above the heads of the spectators, but I saw very unmistakably the wire by which he was suspended. It may not have been _wire_, but I saw the cord, thread, or whatever it may have been, by which he was suspended. Nor is it possible to doubt that the gentlemen, who saw, or supposed themselves to have seen, Mr. Hume floating in the air above them, would have failed to detect any such artifice as that by which the professor of legerdemain was enabled to do the same. And then we must not lose sight of the all-important difference between the two performances, arising from the fact, that the one performer has at command all the facilities afforded by a _locale_ in which he has had abundant opportunity of making every preparation which the resources of his art could suggest to him; whereas