Beauty and attractiveness seldom drape the foundations of even very elegant and useful structures. Laborers digging trenches for foundations, and others placing stones therein, are frequently rough beings, in homely garbs, from whom the refined and sensitive often turn away as soon as politeness and civility permit. Yet, though rough, coarse, and unsightly materials go into foundations, and equally rough workmen lay them, the nature and quality of materials there used, and of work there performed, deserve inspection by any one whose duty, interest, or pleasure induces him to estimate with approximate accuracy the value and prospective utility of the structure which shall rest thereon. Palpable, audible, visible pranks, seeming to be the willed actions of lifeless wood and iron, possibly occurred in the seventeenth, because they are common in the nineteenth century. Such pranks are foundations of arguments which prove a life after death. A table, a chair, or an andiron, manifesting all the usual signs of indwelling vitality, consciousness, intelligence, self-willed action, and of possessing animal senses and capacities, testifies to its being operated upon by some unseen intelligence more convincingly than can the lips of the wisest and truest man the world contains testify to any fact whatsoever which seems supernatural. Vitalized wood or iron speaks "as never man spake;" yes, as man, unless specially aided from outside of the visible world, can never speak; it addresses men's external senses directly; it confides its teachings to the most trusted and most trustworthy conveyances of facts and truths to the mind within. The oft ridiculed, slurred, contemned antics of household furniture are signs put forth to human view by occult operators, whose stand-point, of vision and powers of comprehension enable them to use some natural laws and forces for affecting man and his interests, which human scientists have never clearly cognized, which schoolmen do not embrace in their philosophies, and therefore the cultured world generally has failed to put forth rational and satisfactory explanations of many marvels which the ocean of mystery is often buoying up on to its surface, where they become perceptible by human senses. Modern mind has very extensively measured the credibility of witnesses to witchcraft facts much as the good woman did that of her "sailor boy." On his return home from a voyage around the Hope, he soon began to describe what he had seen, and gave an account of flying fish. "Stop, stop, my son," said the mother; "don't talk like that; people can't believe that, because fishes haven't got no wings, and can't fly." "Well, mother," replied Jack, "I'll pass by the fish, and tell what happened in the Red Sea. When we weighed anchor there, we drew up on its flukes some spokes and felloes of Pharaoh's chariot wheels." "That, now," rejoined the mother, "will do to tell; we can believe that, because _that is in the Bible_."