Page:Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1904).djvu/81

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AND HIS CIRCLE
61

would inevitably be run over and killed. In a terrible fright, she ran to the supposititious child, picked him up and carried him away to a safe place with all the ease that a grown-up young woman would a child of three or four years of age.

There were many other scenes of a similar kind enabled, until Bergheim thought his mediums were exhausted. When he restored them to their usual condition, by a few passes and a smart tap on the shoulder, I asked one of them if she knew what she had been doing, but she seemed quite unconscious of what had taken place, save that she thought sleep had overcome her, in which she dreamt something too indistinct to remember. I witnessed all these things, and to me they appeared quite unaccountable. If the two girls brought hither by Bergheim were in collusion with him, why they must have been equal to the best actresses that ever trod the stage. Even granting that they were acting their parts, I cannot make out how the medium who lifted up one of us off the ground could have got her strength, for it was done without any undue exertion, and she was but an ordinary type of a little London milliner.