long black hair, black beard, black whiskers, black moustache. He wore a ring on his fore-finger and another on his thumb; and when I first saw him I started, but, catching Alice’s eye on me, recovered myself.
“Ow you does, ladies and gentlemants?” said Herr Fritzjok, bowing all round. “You wish durns de dables? You speaks Deutsch, sir?”
“I speak Dutch! Not I,” cried Ormond.
“You, milady?”
“No, none of us understand your language but my daughter. Alice, speak to the gentleman.”
Alice and Herr Fritzjok bowed to each other, and commenced an animated discussion, which resulted in our adjourning to the dining-room and proceeding to business.
Very solemn business it was. Everything was cleared off the table, the lamp being placed on the sideboard; and we all sat down to a Barmecide feast, with our hands spread before us in the place of plates of mutton. On this occasion we had hardly sat five minutes before the table gave a jerk to the left, with a loud crack.
“Wonderful!” cried my uncle.
Next it began to move round slowly and painfully, an inch at a time.
“Tom, you are pushing!” said Ormond to me.
“Zilenze!” cried Herr Fritzjok, “ve sall make zome qwestions. Sbirrid, if you are a sbirrid, and not a push, give a knock.”
Bang came a great thump under the table, right in the middle.
“Most extraordinary!” cried my uncle.
“I hope it is not wicked,” said my aunt, whose eyes were very wide open indeed; and to satisfy her scruples on this point the table was again appealed to, and a code of signals having been agreed upon, such as that one rap was to stand for “Yes,” two for “No,” and that sentences were to be spelled out by our repeating the alphabet, and the table rapping at the proper letter, it replied that our present occupation was not wrong, but rather virtuous than otherwise.
The table, now fairly started, chatted away at a great pace, telling anecdotes of the Morion family, of Harold Ormond, of myself, which we respectively deemed confined to a very select party of friends, in a way calculated to convince the most sceptical. Even Ormond remarked that it was “a doothed odd thing, you know, how the dooth should Herr Fritzjok, let alone the table, know about that affair, you know?” He even tried to improve the occasion by getting a supernatural tip for the Derby, but it was declared that the winner would be “a horse!” which information, though satisfactory as far as it went, was not available for betting purposes.
After some time, Mr. Morion announced that he wished to enter upon a more serious subject than had yet been broached.
“There is a solemn, an awful phenomenon attached to our family, and to which I myself have been a witness,” said he. “Before any great calamity, a spirit, in the form of a black cat, appears to one of us. I should like to know what spirit that is, and why it takes that shape.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth, than we heard a scratching mixed with the knocking under the table, and a most distinct Me-ow was audible in one corner of the room. Ventriloquism? O, of course! that is the way to cut the Gordian knot. And yet how very, very seldom one meets with a ventriloquist; what a rare power his is. Why I, who have made the subject a study, have never met with more than one amateur ventriloquist capable of executing that Me-ow, and that was a Crichton of a friend of mine in the Engineers, who could do everything and anything but make his whiskers and moustache grow, and that he never could accomplish.
And even supposing that Herr Fritzjok—but bah! let me content myself with a truthful narrative of what I saw and heard.
“Will you boot a question to the sbirrid?” the Medium asked my uncle.
“Ahem. Are you the family Banshee?”
No answer.
“Why do you not reply?”
“There is one in the room frightened, which I do not like?”
“Who is that person?”
“Alice,” rapped out the spirit.
“It is true,” said that young lady. “It is very foolish of me, I know, papa, but I should like to go away, if you didn’t mind.”
And then she spoke to the German, and he said something to her, and the table-spirit-cat was consulted, and rapped out “Go.”
So Alice rose and bade an affectionate good night to her parents.
“Why, you silly little puss, how you tremble!” said my uncle, as he kissed her; and the caressing tone of his voice made her cry, I think, for the moment after I heard a distinct sob from the ringlets which floated over her mother’s face, as she bade her, in turn, good night.
That placid lady looked surprised and concerned, for Alice was not accustomed to shed tears, being rather a stern little domestic Tartar, of whom her parents stood in some degree of awe.
“Had I not better come with you?” said she.
“Oh, no, mamma, dear, pray don’t.”
“Must ab fibe for the seànce.”
“Ask the table.”
The table rapped out that Alice alone was to leave.
“I wonder she likth to go to bed and be alone, if she is afraid of the gothth,” observed Ormond.
“Hush!” cried my uncle.
“Me-ow,” squealed the Banshee, amid renewed scratching and knocking; and then my uncle commenced an inquisition into the affairs of the Family Bogy.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“The spirit who appears at intervals in the form of a black cat.”
“Why do you take that form?”
“Because it is my own. I am the Founder of the Family.”
“The Founder of the Family—a cat!”
“Yes, read ‘Darwin.’ Ten hundred thousand years ago some naughty young mastodons put myself and another kitten into a wooden bowl, and set us afloat on a lake, where we drifted to an island. We there had nothing to eat but swallows which skimmed the ground at about the height of