Among my card tricks is included the elementary one (technically known as 'forcing a card') described at the beginning of this chapter, but I may let some one choose a card from the pack on the table whilst my back is turned; then, the card being placed in the pack which I have now taken in my hand, I do some other trick. It is common for these tricks to be confounded, and for one of my audience to assure friends that I let him or her take a card from the pack on the table when my back was turned and then named it by 'thought-reading.' Such a performance is beyond me, but a like garbled account is characteristic of what we hear concerning seances: the story-tellers are in a state of mental confusion, they add or subtract in order to make the result emphatic, any power of criticism they possess is suspended, and we are asked to swallow the final product and confess ourselves believers. After considering my own experiences and the evidence produced by Sir Oliver Lodge, I have reached the conclusion that no one desirous of believing only the truth can accept anything 'supernormal' without the strictest investigation on the spot, aided by a knowledge of trickery, verbal or material, as well as of the results produced by dissociation and logic-tight compartments in the minds of the would-be honest. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shows how convincing a twice-told tale becomes. I borrow from _The New Revelation_ (p. 64):-- 'Or once again, if Raymond can tell us of a photograph no copy of which had reached England, and which proved to be exactly as he described it, and if he can give us, through the lips of strangers, all sorts of details of his home life, which his own relatives had to verify before they found them to be true, is it unreasonable to suppose that he is fairly accurate in his description of his own experiences and state of life at the moment at which he is communicating?' The words 'can tell us of a photograph no copy of which had reached England' would lead us to believe that information that the photograph existed came from Raymond: fortunately the original account is accessible. Here is the photograph story, taken from _Raymond_ (p. 195). The medium speaks, saying: 'You have several portraits of this boy. Before he went away you had got a good portrait of him--two--no three. Two where he is alone and one where he is in a group of other men. He is particular that I should tell you of this. In one you see his walking-stick'. (Moonstone here put an imaginary stick under his arm.) This is ordinary guess-work, and it would be true of the families of most officers, even as to the stick; but it was not true in this case, for we read that though they had 'single photographs of him of course, and in uniform', they had _not_ one of him in a group of other men; yet this is the revelation referred to by Sir Arthur--the photograph incident that has impressed so many.