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Fig. 18.

Fig. 19.striking would result from the blow given by the end of the tongs when it was suddenly shot out in search of objects to grasp. It might feel like a “boy’s hand,” or a girl’s hand, or an old woman’s hand, to anybody who speculated, with the least tendency to give licence to his imagination. Moreover, no hands or feet could compete with it in the “celerity with which it frolicked, like Puck, under the table, now at one side, now at another.” It would have been impossible to shift the feet or the hands, so as to attain this celerity without a derangement of the body, of which the contiguous sitters would have been sensible. Therefore I have not the slightest doubt that the lazy-tongs was the source of these phenomena, especially when I find the necessity for their employment, which arose at a subsequent stage of the performance, and to which I shall advert when I mount to that higher stage of the great Cornhill Mystery.

It will be observed that the writer was on the point of identifying this instrument to his own satisfaction; but if he just stopped short of that, he has identified it to mine. He states that soon after the twitching, scraping process, &c., “what seemed to be a large hand came under the table cover, and with the fingers clustered to a point, raised it between me and the table.” As it was “under the table cover,” the impression as to its fingers must have been somewhat conjectural, especially as these same fingers were “clustered to a point.” The writer evinces the uncertainty of his impression as to its nature, for he states that he was somewhat eager to satisfy his curiosity. “I seized it,” he adds, “felt it very sensibly, but it went out like air in my grasp. I know of no analogy in connection with the sense of touch by which I could make the nature of that feeling intelligible. It was as palpable as any soft substance, velvet or pulp, and at the touch it seemed as solid; but pressure reduced it to air.” The surface velvety-feel could be easily produced by various kinds of covering, while its evaporation in the writer’s grasp may be as easily accounted for.

Fig. 20.

Assuming that he seized the two ends when they were in some degree open, as thus in Fig. 20, if they were instantly closed and withdrawn, the pressure of his hand would appear to reduce them to air.

“Whither were they vanished? Into the air; and what seemed corporeal, melted as breath into the wind—would they had staid!” we exclaim in the words of Macbeth, and then we could have given the reader their exact length and true dimensions, and told him whether they were covered with terry velvet or caoutchouc.

It is highly probable that the hand-bell, taken under the table from the hand of a person who held it there, which was rung at different points, and then returned (still under the table), was operated on by the same instrument. The hand of Mr. Home, which still remained on the table, could easily agitate the surface of the table-cloth, so as to cause the white sheets of paper to move, and gradually disappear over the edge of the table into the blank space beneath the window; and if it was there that they lay, any further movements of Mr. Home, who sat next the window, would equally account for their “creasing and crumpling on the floor” for a considerable time afterwards; and they could be returned in like manner. So, also, flowers could be grasped and distributed, with the assistance of the lazy-tongs, or disengaged hand, to any person in the circle. “The substance of what seemed a hand, with white, long, and delicate fingers, rose slowly in the darkness, and, bending over a flower, suddenly vanished with it. . . . The flowers were distributed in the manner in which they had been removed; a hand, of which the lambent gleam was visible, slowly ascending from beneath the cover, and placing the flower in the hand for which it was intended.” The same instrument could snip the geranium blossoms in the adjoining window, and toss them among the company. In all this there is nothing extraordinary—nothing half so strange as the inference seemingly suggested, that the spirits are unable to make presents to their favourites, unless the materials are provided at mortal cost, and are in tolerably close proximity to the recipients.

I infer that in the next place the accordion also disappeared by the very same agency. “It was as black as pitch,” says the writer, “but we could just make out ‘a dark mass’ rising awkwardly above the edge of the table, and clumsily emitting a sound as it passed over into the space beneath. A quarter of an hour afterwards we heard the accordion beginning to play where it lay on the ground.” The accordion was lying “in a narrow space which would not admit of its being drawn out with the requisite freedom to the full extent;” whence I assume that it did not falsify the principles of its construction by any performance of its own, but that something else was heard, of which in the dark, and with the help of the imagination, judiciously directed towards the place where it lay, the helpless accordion obtained all the credit. There is an instrument termed a mouth-harmonicon, of which a representation appears over-leaf, in fig. 21, and which is, in fact, the musical principle of an accordion, to which the mouth plays the part of bellows, with the increased powers of modulation belonging to the mouth by nature. This