We should concede its probable correctness, were an historian to make the supposition that the two Indian slaves in Mr. Parris's kitchen, John Indian and his wife Tituba, often amused themselves and any young folks or other visitors, who there basked in genial light and warmth from blazing logs in a huge New England fireplace on a cold winter's evening, by rehearsing ghost stories and magic lore, and performing any such feats in fortune-telling or other mystical doings as they might be able to exhibit, or as might transpire through them. That the little girls, Elizabeth, daughter of Mr. Parris, and Abigail Williams, his niece, were accustomed to spend many cold winter evenings in the warm kitchen of their own home is very credible. Mary Walcut and Susanna Sheldon, who lived in the near neighborhood, perhaps dropped in frequently. But the majority of those whose astonishing proficiency in performing what Drake said the circle met for, viz., "to do or produce superhuman acts," and for _learning_, as Upham would say, how to manifest "the superstition of the middle ages ... embodied in real action,"--the _majority_ of those girls obviously must have had only very restricted opportunities for study and practice at the parsonage. It is not at all improbable that each of them was present in that kitchen occasionally during two months of that winter; nor that each of them was impregnated by the auras of that place and of its occupants both visible and invisible; nor that the physical and psychic soils in each were there mellowed, and also sown with some seed which produced unlooked-for fruits during the following spring and summer. Mediumistic capabilities are innate peculiarities, measurably hereditary, and nearly always amenable to special conditions and surroundings for conspicuous development. King Saul became a prophet, i. e., a medium, only when he met, mingled with, and imbibed emanations from prophets or mediums. Messengers whom he sent to the prophets succumbed to new and developing influences upon arriving at their destination, and became suddenly prophets themselves. Latent germs of spiritualistic capabilities, if permeated by quickening auras, which often emanate from positive mediums, frequently unfold into mediumship, as naturally as specific elements, reaching latent germs in many human systems, expand those germs into measles, or into whooping-cough; or as naturally as listening to soul-stirring music energizes latent capabilities in many who are acted upon by its strains, and helps such to become themselves better musicians than before.