An evening having been arranged, the two gentlemen called at my house, and, after a chat, the demonstrations were undertaken. A broom was placed on the floor, and then, the medium kneeling over the object (or, rather, squatting on the ground), he placed his fingers on either side of the broom-handle, and then gradually took them away. As he did so the broom was seen to rise into the air. It remained suspended in space for a few seconds, then fell to the floor. The effect was most striking, while the phenomenon was of that simple order which one would naturally expect to discover in a simple undeveloped medium. The first two or three experiments interested me immensely, I must confess. But I noted one particular thing about the movements of the medium, which was that every time he placed an object on the floor, he placed it very close to his knees; this caused me to look between his knees intently instead of at the object during the next few trials. The result was that I distinctly saw _a fine black thread_ stretched from leg to leg, forming a loop, into which the various objects were slipped in the act of placing them on the floor. The rest was only a matter of balance. In spite of the fact that I had discovered the _modus operandi_, I did not wish to act hastily, having been accused so often in the past of condemning too hastily upon discovering the fraud. Accordingly I asked the medium to meet me a few evenings later at the office of my friend, Dr. Gustave Sayer, and here we witnessed a second demonstration. It would be useless to repeat the details of this performance, which was simply a repetition of the first. Suffice it to say that not only was the medium seen using the loop of thread throughout, but this loop broke twice during the evening--once in the middle of the experiment--the thread being heard to break, and the object at once falling to the ground. On the first occasion the medium made an excuse, retired upstairs, and evidently arranged the thread, for he came down again in a few minutes and proceeded to give us a further test. Upon the thread (audibly) breaking a second time, however, he said that he "did not think he could do any more for us that evening," and sat down, apparently exhausted. It was the most flagrant and bare-faced swindle I ever came across, and in this Dr. Sayer agrees with me. And yet here was a young lawyer practising these tricks, apparently for no motive, and constantly lying about them in a most astonishing manner; and this was a case from which much was to be hoped, apparently.' This story hardly needs comment; but the writer's attitude towards another and more famous medium, Eusapia Palladino, is very different.