My second visit to America was paid in the year of the Diamond Jubilee, 1897.

After wintering in the West Indies, I went on to America in the spring, chiefly with the view of meeting Mrs Piper for the first time, and securing a few sittings with her if possible.[5]

I was writing some articles for Borderland at the time, and Mr Stead was specially anxious for me to take this opportunity of "sampling" the famous American sensitive.

This proved no easy task. My visit to Boston, unfortunately, occurred at the very time when an organised attempt was being made by the American branch of the Society for Psychical Research to get into some sort of evidential communication with the late Mr Stainton Moses through his "controls" Imperator, Rector, etc.

In vain I wrote to Dr Hodgson (to whom I carried letters of introduction) telling him of my chief reason for visiting America a second time. Even the plea that I had known Mr Stainton Moses in earth life, and that we had several intimate friends in common, was of no avail.

Dr Hodgson expressed regrets, but assured me that no sittings could be allowed under existing circumstances, and that it was impossible to make any exception to this rule.

We seemed to have arrived at a cul-de-sac, when a bright idea struck me.

Why not ask the unseen themselves for a decision in the matter?

I wrote again, therefore, to Dr Hodgson, suggesting this idea, and mentioning that I should arrive in Boston on a certain date, and could be found at the Hotel Bellevue in that city.

The next day but one after my arrival, and quite early in the morning, Dr Hodgson came to call upon me.

It was my first sight of that genial and delightful personality. At the very moment of shaking hands, he said cheerily, and with a look of half-rueful amusement at his own discomfiture:

"Well, you've got to come! They insist upon it, so there is nothing more to be said."

My preconceived ideas of a critical, elderly, and white-haired professor, taking himself very seriously, were dissipated on the spot; and this was the beginning of a sincere and loyal friendship between us which lasted for nine years on this sphere, and will last, I trust and believe, through whatever forms of existence may succeed to this one.

We made arrangements at once for my joining Dr Hodgson next morning at Arlington Heights, where my first sitting with Mrs Piper took place, and where I met for the first time this refined and interesting-looking woman.

I was told that with the advent of the Imperator and Stainton Moses' controls, the character of Mrs Piper's mediumship had undergone a complete change. The former communications through the voice ceased, and gave place to automatic writing, except at the moment of return to the physical body, when a chance sentence or two might be uttered during the transition period, but that these were not always intelligible to the listener.

Mrs Piper's arm and hand became curiously "dead" and limp when unconsciousness set in; the blood departed, leaving it as white and helpless as that of a corpse. By degrees this dead look disappeared. The blood flowed once more through the veins, and as I noticed this change, the hand moved gropingly towards the pencil held out by Dr Hodgson, and finally grasped it. The latter's long practice and infinite patience were invaluable in making out the often rather illegible script. The hospitality he gave to all attempts at definite communications, however vague and shadowy at first; the infinite patience with which he repeated again and again a question not fully comprehended—all this, combined with intelligent criticism, alert, dispassionate judgment and balance of mind, made an investigator of psychic phenomena very rarely to be met in a world where most of us evince in a marked degree "les dÉfauts de nos qualitÉs."

To combine sympathy, patience, and receptivity with cool and critical judgment is well-nigh impossible for ordinary men and women.

Dr Richard Hodgson certainly solved the problem to a very remarkable extent.

The first thing that struck me in the two sittings I had with Mrs Piper, was the hopeless breakdown of the Thought Transference Theory, as accounting for the automatic writing.

The ostensible reason for my presence at Arlington Heights was the idea entertained by the "controls" that, having known Mr Stainton Moses in earth life, I might be able to facilitate his communications. I hope this may have been the case, but if so, it was certainly not due to any power of Thought Transference I may have possessed.

Again and again I asked for names of friends we had known in common, but nearly always in vain. Even when, in despair of getting these normally, I concentrated my mind consciously on some short and easy name, the latter was not given.

Yet next day some of these names would appear spontaneously on the script, when my mind was entirely occupied by other subjects.

References were made to Mr Moses' lack of appreciation for music, and he asked whether our mutual friend Mrs Stratton still played Liszt. He also referred to his visiting the Strattons, and finding them playing duets together, in London.

On my return to town Mrs Stratton fully endorsed the fact that Mr Moses disliked music (this was unknown to me), but she denied emphatically that she and her husband ever played duets in his presence. Mr Stratton, however, corrected this impression, and reminded her of several occasions when Mr Moses had come to them from University College, found them at the piano, and being on very intimate terms, had begged they would finish the passage or movement; and on one or two occasions this had been done.

These slight but evidential incidents, forgotten by Mrs Stratton herself, and unknown to me, were conveyed quite correctly in the automatic script through Mrs Piper—three thousand miles across the Atlantic—and nearly six years after the death of Mr Stainton Moses.

The most convincing test upon these occasions, however, was the reference to a Mrs Lane—the lady to whom Mr Moses had been engaged when he passed away.

Very few of his friends knew of this engagement, even in England. Dr Hodgson, who had never met Stainton Moses in earth life, had naturally not heard of it. It was only by chance that I knew anything of the matter, and this merely through once meeting the lady at Mrs Stratton's house some time after Mr Moses had died. On that occasion Mrs Lane had a young daughter with her; I knew nothing of any other members of the family.

During my second visit to Mrs Piper I mentioned meeting this lady—already a dim memory with me—and the "control" at once asked if I had met a sister also.

I answered "No," remarking that a young daughter had been with her.

The writing at once continued in these words:

"Well, now I am giving you this as a test: she has a sister, and one who has been the cause of the deepest sorrow of her life. You will find this is true when you go back to England."

These words were amply justified.

On applying to Mrs Stratton for information, she denied the possibility of there being any truth in the test. She said: "I have come to know Mrs Lane very intimately since you met her here. I don't believe she has any sister; anyway, I am quite sure she would have told me if a sister had caused her such sorrow as you mention."

I persevered, however, in getting at the truth of the matter by writing to Mrs Lane herself (an almost entire stranger), and asking if she cared to hear the references to herself in the Piper records; if so, would she come and lunch with me?

She came, and when I reached the passage about the sister, expecting that she would endorse Mrs Stratton's denial, I noticed, to my great surprise, that her eyes filled suddenly with tears, and that she was literally unable to speak through emotion.

The tears ran down her cheeks, when at length she said in a broken voice: "That is the most convincing test he could have given me! No! I have never mentioned that sister, even to Mrs Stratton, kind and good as she has been" (by this time I had spoken of Mrs Stratton's denial of the sister's existence). "I could not speak of her to anyone. She was the cause of the greatest sorrow in my life; but no one upon earth knew this except Mr Stainton Moses. I was engaged to him at the time, and he was the natural person to turn to in my deep tribulation. No one else ever heard of the circumstances."

At this second sitting of mine Mr Stainton Moses spoke also of a valuable watch he had possessed, and expressed some regret that it had not been given to Mrs Lane at the time of his death.

I knew nothing at all about any watch of his, but on appealing to one of his executors, an old friend of mine, found there was such a watch, which had been a presentation one, and was of considerable value. Upon the death of Mr Moses it had been given (quite with the approval of Mrs Lane) to the son of a very old and esteemed friend.

This executor also told me, as a curious coincidence, that when I was staying with the excitable sensitive in Sussex Gardens, mentioned in a previous chapter, and he and his wife had come to tea with me one afternoon (to be introduced to this remarkable lady), she had given him a similar message about the same watch, purporting to come from Stainton Moses.

I remember perfectly well having asked Mr and Mrs Harrington to come to tea with me one afternoon to meet my eccentric landlady, and I also remember his having a long talk with her whilst his wife and I were immersed in our own conversation. But I heard no details of this talk. He had merely said how much interested he had been in meeting Mrs Peters, and that she evidently had some mediumistic power.

It was certainly curious that the watch should have been mentioned, first in Sussex Gardens, London, and six years later in Arlington Heights, Boston, and that on each occasion the same wish with regard to it should have been expressed!

During this Arlington Heights sitting (the second one), Mr Moses also referred to an MS., of which I knew nothing at the time. This allusion also was verified by his other executor, the late Mr Alaric Watts, upon my return to England.

During this visit to America I also came across a Mr Knapton Thompson, a hard-headed Yorkshire man, who had invented a new kind of smokeless combustion stove, which must have been a good one, for our shrewd American cousins were employing him to put up these stoves in several public buildings, including the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.

Mr Thompson combined psychic proclivities with his smokeless invention, and had become greatly interested in the New York medium, Mrs Stoddart Gray, who has been already mentioned in connection with my own investigations, twelve years previous to my present visit. He had written to tell Mr Stead of his experiences, which included several in which the Julia of "Julia's Letters" had purported to be present.

Mr Stead had turned this gentleman over to me by giving me an introduction, accompanied by the request that "I should see the man and report what I thought about him and his wonderful experiences."

So I asked Mr Thompson to call upon me, and arranged to be present with him next day (Saturday) at Mrs Stoddart Gray's circle.

I found that he had taken up his abode with the medium and her son during his short stays in New York, with the openly expressed intention of finding out if there were any trickery behind the scenes. He had, however, convinced himself of her bon fides, and was deeply interested in the interviews he was able to obtain by means of these mediums, with a daughter he had lost some years previously. He was much pleased to find that I knew Mrs Gray already and could also testify to some very remarkable phenomena occurring to me at her house.

So I met him there next afternoon, with every expectation of a good sitting. These hopes, however, were entirely destroyed owing to the presence of a noisy, vulgar man, whom they called the "Whisky King." He made the most inane remarks, cracked stupid jokes, antagonised every respectable person in the room, I should suppose; and as all this took place without a word of protest from the lady of the house, one can only conclude that she considered it worth her while to endure his vulgarities.

Certainly the afternoon was spoilt for the rest of us, and I remarked upon this to a very pleasant, smart-looking young American lady when the sitting was over and we had retired to the reception-room to find wraps and galoshes, etc.

"Oh yes; wasn't he just exasperating?" she said, with ready sympathy.

She looked much too young and smart and good-looking for the ordinary type of "investigator," and I could not refrain from asking how she had come into this galÈre.

She explained her position readily, and it was very interesting to me.

She was a young married lady, and had first been brought to the house, six months before, by a cousin of hers who was staying with them in New York, and thought the experience might be amusing.

"We just came in for a joke," she said; "but something happened which interested me so much that I have come again several times, and until to-day have always had an interesting time."

Then she told me about her first sitting.

I had noticed upon her ungloved hand a very beautiful scarabÆus, set in fine gold, and evidently by an artist in the craft. "Yes, it is a Tiffany setting," she observed, seeing my eyes drawn to it. She took off the ring, and gave it into my hands.

"That ring is really the cause of my being here to-day," she continued. "The scarabÆus was given to me some years ago by Professor——" (she gave the name of a well-known American Egyptologist). "He made a great pet of me when I was a child, and I begged it from him. When I was going to be married last year he insisted upon having it set for me by Tiffany as a wedding present, and he then told me there was no doubt at all about its being a genuine antique. He had come across it many years before by a curious chance when travelling in Egypt, and had been assured that it was a genuine Cleopatra relic. 'I can't answer for that,' he said, laughing, 'but it is certainly many centuries old. I have no doubt it is genuine so far as age goes.' Well, the night my cousin and I came here together I did not take off my gloves until after we had gone in to the sÉance room, so no one could have seen my ring—and you know Mrs Gray's sittings always begin in the dark? I took my gloves off when I found we had to sit in a circle holding hands, and one of the first materialisations was announced to be that of Cleopatra." (I had seen "Cleopatra" more than once in 1886, in the same house—E. K. B.) "She rushed across the room in the complete darkness, seized my right hand, amongst all the hands in a circle of twenty people or more, almost tore this special ring from my finger, and said in a tone of indescribable grief and longing: 'Mine! Mine! Ah, Chem! Chem!'"

This was sufficiently startling, even apart from the mention of Chem, as the ancient name for Egypt, in a milieu of this kind!

The ring was faithfully restored later in the evening; and the young lady who owned it had been sufficiently impressed by the circumstances to confide them to her kind professor, and also to pay more than one visit to Mrs Stoddart Gray since the episode had occurred, which was just six months before our meeting there.

During this second visit to America I made the acquaintance, and, I trust I may say, gained the friendship, of Miss Lilian Whiting, so well known by many thousands of grateful readers. We saw a great deal of each other in Boston, and during one of my long chats with her in her pretty sitting-room at the Brunswick Hotel, she told me of the visit of Lady Henry Somerset and Miss Frances Willard to that city, some years before our conversation. Miss Whiting also mentioned a friend who had accompanied these two ladies, and who had been taken ill, and had died very suddenly in the hospital at Boston.

"I never met the lady," said Miss Whiting, "but Miss Willard and Lady Henry told me they had been obliged to leave their friend behind owing to an attack of influenza, and asked me to call upon her someday. I went a day or two later, carrying some fruit and newspapers with me. The matron, whom I knew well, said her patient was doing splendidly, and was likely to be leaving in a few days, but that as I was a stranger, it would perhaps be better for me not to come in and see her that afternoon. So I left my little gifts, and was shocked next day to hear of her sudden and quite unexpected death. By-the-by, I believe she was Stead's 'Julia'—I am not sure about this, but somebody told me so lately."

Miss Whiting then mentioned the lady's name, which I withhold, as Mr Stead still makes use of it as a test when strangers profess to be in communication with "Julia."

The day following the sÉance just described as taking place in New York, Mr Knapton Thompson called at my hotel to ask me to accompany him to Mrs Stoddart Gray, as he had arranged to have a short "writing sÉance" that afternoon.

The son was the agent as usual. On this occasion he had an alphabet mounted on card, and pointed to the letters in turn, whilst his mother wrote them down as indicated. Thinking I would verify Miss Whiting's story if possible, my first question was:

"Can Stead's Julia give me her surname?"

"Julia O." was spelt out, and then the O was given again.

"They often do that," said Mrs Gray casually—"begin the name over again, I mean."

So it passed at that. The rest of the letters corroborated the surname mentioned by Miss Whiting.

Then I asked: "In what country did you pass away—Europe or America, or elsewhere?"

"America" was spelt out at once.

"In what city?"

"Boston."

"Was it in a private house, a hospital, a hotel, or where did you die?"

"In a hospital" was again spelt out.

"How long ago?"

"Five years" was the answer.

I may note here that Miss Whiting had not mentioned the number of years, only having said "A few years ago" when speaking of the event. Five years proved to be true. My last question was:

"What was your age when you passed over?"

"Twenty-three" was the answer.

This last, I felt sure, must be wrong. Miss Whiting had not mentioned any age, but it seemed to me unlikely that so young a woman should have been travelling round the country with two temperance lecturers.

When these answers were being given, Mrs Gray's son, the medium, asked if he might put one hand on my wrist to come into magnetic conditions with me.

I agreed to this, but said I should turn my eyes away from the alphabet, lest my muscles should give him any unconscious indications.

When I sent these answers to Mr Stead on returning to England, I wrote down Julia O. (ignoring the repetition of the O); and in connection with the other answers, told him, of course, of my previous conversation with Miss Whiting, which reduced the whole episode to one of possible Thought Transference.

In answering me he said: "I am glad Julia was able to give her name, even if it were Thought Transference; but, as a matter of fact, it is not her whole name which you received—she always signed her letters to me 'Julia O. O....'" This makes rather a good bit of evidence, seeing that the second O had been given, but discarded by Mrs Gray and myself as a repetition of the first letter of the surname!

To resume my experiences with Mr Knapton Thompson.

In the evening of this writing incident Mrs Gray had another public sÉance, at which I was again present, Mr Thompson sitting on one side of me.

After some "materialisations," for other members of the circle had appeared, Mrs Gray announced that Stead's "Julia" was present in the cabinet, and wished to speak to me.

I went up at once, and the form came out and stood in very fair light from the gas-burners. She seized my hands with every appearance of delight and eagerness, and her grasp was strong and tense. It is my peculiarity always to notice hands very accurately. They always seem to me to indicate character very closely; and apart from this, I am attracted by people who have well-shaped hands (not necessarily small ones), and find it very difficult to ignore clumsy or ugly fingers, which, unfortunately, never escape my notice.

Now the medium's hands were broad, short, and flabby, as I had had plenty of opportunities of noting in the afternoon when he held my wrist. The hands which grasped mine now were, on the contrary, well made, small, and rather narrow, the true type of the American female hand.

Mr Thompson had come up also to greet "Julia," and I whispered to him:

"Do ask Julia if there was not a mistake about her age this afternoon."

"No; you ask the question yourself, Miss Bates," he answered.

So I said rather eagerly: "Julia, do tell us, please, if there was not a mistake this afternoon in your age—the answer was twenty-three. Is that correct?"

A very emphatic shake of the head signifying "No" was the reply to this last question, but no sounds proceeded from the lips.

Disappointed by this, I asked; "Can you not speak to us?"

She made a little gesture of rather helpless dissent; and Mrs Gray, who stood by, explained that probably all her strength had gone to building up the materialised body sufficiently to make it visible to us. Julia bowed her head in assent to this, and then, still speechless, retired once more behind the curtains.

I did not mention this appearance of Julia when writing to Mr Stead on my return—I was so anxiously hoping that she might have tried to impress the fact of having appeared to me, upon his consciousness, as a test; but he said nothing about it in his first letters. So I let the matter alone for a time, determining to tell him some day, but much disappointed by the usual failure in getting corroborative evidence.

A week later, however, at the end of a long letter on other subjects, I put this short P. S. in a casual way to him:

"Did Julia ever tell you that she had appeared to me in New York?"

In answering my letter he replied—also in a P. S.:

"By-the-by, to answer your last query—yes. Julia told me weeks ago that she had appeared to you in New York, but that she could not give you her age on that occasion, because she was not accustomed to speaking through the embodiment."

Now in sending the list of questions and answers to Mr Stead I had merely marked against the answer as to her age, "twenty-three," that doubtless it was an error, but I had never hinted to him that I had asked her to correct the error in New York, or that she had been unable to speak on that occasion.

This again was a good bit of independent evidence.

I will now give a description of Mr Knapton Thompson's interview with his daughter, on the same evening that Julia appeared to me. I have already said that the magnet which drew Mr Thompson to these sÉances was the opportunity given to him of meeting and talking to a daughter who had passed away some years previously.

On this special evening the daughter materialised as usual, and came out from the cabinet. As Mr Thompson was sitting next to me at the time, I could distinctly hear Mrs Gray whisper to him:

"Would you not like to take your daughter into the other room, Mr Thompson? It is rather crowded here to-night. You would be quieter in there."

Mr Thompson got up at once, and greeted the materialised form, and they disappeared through the folding doors to the reception-room. Other matters of interest were occurring, and I had quite forgotten the absence of Mr Thompson in the dimly lighted room (in those days the light was always dim at first), until I found he was again occupying the seat next to my own. I had not noticed his return, and asked him at once 'what he had done with his daughter.' A good half hour must have elapsed between his disappearance and return. He said, quite simply and as a matter of course: "Oh, she did not care to come back into this crowded room. We had half-an-hour's chat, and then she de-materialised in the other room, and I returned alone."

I can only repeat that Mr Knapton Thompson was a shrewd, practical Yorkshireman, and a very successful man of business, as was proved by the orders he received in America for the stoves he had invented.

He was certainly under the impression that he could be trusted to recognise his own daughter when allowed the privilege of half-an-hour's conversation with her, tÊte-À-tÊte in a private room.

I cannot end this chapter without saying something about Keely of Philadelphia and his intuitional genius.

I had hoped to have the opportunity of meeting this wonderful man during my last stay in Philadelphia, U.S.A. (March 1897), but was disappointed in this expectation. Therefore, on the outer plane, my connection with Keely never went beyond a single interview with his wife; but this is a record of personal intuitions as well as of personal events, and I know no one with regard to whom my intuitions—absolutely lacking in any physical ground of proof, or even mental ground of comprehension—have been stronger or more obstinate.

At the time of my first visit to America, so far back as 1885, I had not the faintest conception of Keely's work, or what he claimed to have discovered or to be on the track of discovering. I never heard his name mentioned without being told at the same time that he was either a silly madman or a conscious impostor, and as I came with an entirely unprejudiced mind (for I had never heard of Keely before landing in America), it would have been natural to accept this universal opinion.

Yet something stronger than reason was always silently contradicting these assertions, when made in my presence. Friends and acquaintances alike in those days laughed at Keely's claims, and denounced his boasted discovery as pure imposture.

"'Tisn't! 'Tisn't! 'Tisn't!" that persistent little voice kept whispering in my ear all the time, like a naughty, obstinate child who contradicts from sheer ignorance—or was it a spiritual intuition? Time alone can answer that question; anyway, I kept my ideas to myself, for they had no foundation in fact at the time of which I speak.

In 1897 the position for me was altered. A sensible and dependable friend of mine—a well-known banker in Philadelphia—described to me his experiences and those of other prominent citizens during a demonstration of Mr Keely's powers; and the old insistent voice that spoke to my ignorance before, spoke now to some glimmering understanding of the claim put forth. This claim—even then jeered at by the world at large—had to wait shivering in the cold another nine years, before Mr Frederic Soddy clothed it in respectable scientific garb by speaking publicly of the possibilities in the future connected with atomic disintegration and consequent liberation of energy.

But the yelping curs of Calumny that pursued Keely during his lifetime are still upon the dead man's tracks.

"His methods were fraud and imposture, anyway"; "His wires were tubes containing compressed air," and so forth. The M.F.H. of this pack of hounds was the son of a lady whose name will always be honourably mentioned with that of Keely as one of his most generous supporters.

The initial misfortune in the whole matter was the forming and starting of the Keely Motor Company to utilise the discovery, which should first have been placed under the protection of Science.

Ignorant and impatient shareholders thought only of their own material advantages and dividends. They were Keely's first enemies, with their sensational and premature advertisements of results and "200 horse-power engines ready to patent, etc.," whilst the poor man was still struggling with his tremendous problem—i.e. to control the force that he had discovered.

He attempted this first by confining it, but it blew everything to atoms, and his own fingers off into the bargain!

Occultists—including Madame Blavatsky—always declared this latent atomic energy was a fact, but that Keely would never be allowed to demonstrate it, for the world was not yet prepared for such a tremendous dynamic force to be let loose upon it, and that the most serious abuses and disasters would follow, if once he succeeded in bringing his discovery into practical working order.

They said it would be one of two things: either Keely's experiments in this direction would continue to fail in the crucial point necessary, or that if he succeeded it would be his own death warrant, lest any mischief should accrue from his making his methods public.

In view of these pronouncements, the succeeding events in Keely's career are interesting.

The Times (U.S.A.) of 6th March 1898 contained the following announcement, under Keely's own signature:—

After twenty-five years' labour I have solved the problem of harnessing the ether (which elsewhere he says is only the medium of the force he discovered) and adapting it to commercial uses. I have finished experimenting.—My work is now completed.
(Signed) John W. Keely.

On 18th November of this same year he died.

Within two months, his generous friend and patron, Mrs Blomfield Moore, followed him to another sphere. Keely's final discovery of the means of "harnessing the ether," as he calls it, was through holding it in rotation instead of in confinement.

I am allowed to quote an extract from a private letter with regard to this statement.

"This instrument ruptures the luminous envelopes of the hydrogen corpuscles, liberating the mysterious substance, which is put into such high rotation that it forms its own wall of confinement at 420,000 revolutions per second, as calculated. Independent of this rotation in the tube, where it is projected, it could be no more held in suspension than a ray of sunshine could be held in a darkened room."

I have been given to understand that a faithful account of everything that has occurred in connection with Keely's discovery has been compiled, and will be published "when the time comes for the truth to be made known."

It is, of course, possible that this disclosure may be anticipated by the arrival of another "crank and impostor" of the Keely type. Let us trust he may arise from within and not from without, scientific circles, and thus avoid his martyrdom!

Meanwhile it may be interesting to quote from a published letter of Lascelles-Scott, the Government physicist from Forest Gate, who visited Keely's workshop in the interests of Science, and who was allowed to cut and bring away with him pieces of the wire Keely was using. (Said to be tubes by the wiseacres!)

The following is the essential portion of Mr Lascelles-Scott's letter. I only omit courteous expressions of gratitude to the editor and "to the institutions and individuals alike" of the "beautiful city of Philadelphia" where he was able to carry out his investigations.

The only corrections of sufficient importance, to the general sense of my observations at the Franklin Institute last Wednesday night, to call for notice in your otherwise admirable report, are the following:—

Although my observations were only put forward as "preliminary," inasmuch as I have not yet completed the outlined programme I had in view, no words actually used by me justified the expression that "I had formed no very definite opinions."

On the contrary, I stated more than once the very definite opinion that Mr Keely has demonstrated to me, in a way which is absolutely unquestionable, the existence of a force hitherto unknown. (The italics are mine.—E. K. B.)

The conditions under which the experiments were carried out (as I distinctly stated) were such as to preclude the possibility of the results obtained being due to any ordinary source of power, evident or concealed.

Moreover, I satisfied myself that the rotation of the "vibrodyne" was neither due to, nor accompanied by, any traces of electricity or magnetism. So far my opinion is and was expressed as being of the most definite kind possible.

... I stated, and the statement was greeted by the audience with great and prolonged applause, that, after a little adjustment of the "Sympathetic Transmitter," it was found that by the sounding of one of the small English tuning forks I had brought with me from the other side of the Atlantic, upon the said "Transmitter," I could myself start the vibrodyne, and cause it to revolve rapidly, without Mr Keely's intervention, and I exhibited to the meeting, the fork actually used by me.—Thanking you in anticipation, etc., I am, sir, yours obediently,
W. Lascelles-Scott.

One would have supposed that this testimony, in addition to that of other scientists and practical electricians, would have sufficed to disintegrate Atomic Stupidity and Calumny, and liberate the forces of Humility and Sane Investigation.

But prejudiced Ignorance dies hard!

To end my chapter on a pleasanter note than this, I will quote from a private letter which I have been privileged to read, the beautiful words in which Keely describes his own achievements.

I have no power that is not communicated to me in the same way that this machine receives its power: through celestial radiation from the Soul of Matter, the Mind force of the Creator, whose instrument I am. I know who is leading me and making all things work together for good.