"Chester is a hill town in Western Massachusetts, and Northampton is seventeen miles distant. While in Northampton I was often at my father's house—probably every week—and during some of the years from 1866 to 1873 I knew Katy McGuire as a servant assisting my mother.
"She was an obliging and pleasant girl and always glad to see me. She had no family in' Chester and I do not know where she came from. Neither do I know where or when she died—but I know she is dead."
Dr. De Wolf adds that Mr. Wilkie was never within five hundred miles of Chester. He adds: "Neither of us were believers in spiritual manifestations of this character, and this event so impressed us that we did not like to talk about it, and it has been very seldom referred to when we met."
It must be borne in mind that the record was made three years after the incident. Moreover, Dr. De Wolf, in answer to our first letter and before receiving from us Mr. Wilkie's account, professed to be unable to "recall with any definite recollection" the circumstances. But there seems little reason to doubt the substantial accuracy of the narrative. We cannot, of course, absolutely exclude the possibility that Mr. Wilkie had at one time heard of these details of his friend's early life. The two had met, as Dr. De Wolf tells us, soon after his removal to Chicago in 1873, when the memory of Kitty McGuire would have been still comparatively recent. But in the circumstances such an explanation can scarcely be held as plausible.
