CHAPTER II
THE FIRST RAPS
Hydesville was a very small village in the extreme north of New York State. It was not far from Lake Ontario, and not very far from Niagara. From New York it was two hundred and fifty miles distant—a two-days' journey at the time—and the nearest town of any size, Rochester, was thirty miles away. Hydesville was, in fact, merely an irregular cluster of a few dozen wooden houses, lying on the outskirts of the larger village of Arcadia. The people were, of course, farmers and purveyors to farmers. The winter was a long stretch of small talk over blazing fires, while the land without lay in the grip of the terrible northern winter. The summer and autunn—there is scarcely a spring—were crowded with agricultural and domestic work. It was a world in which the birth of kittens mattered, and the flight of a crow was an omen.
Here, in the winter of 1847-8, lived a quiet Methodist farmer, John D. Fox, with his family. In the house with Mr. and Mrs. Fox were Margaretta, or Maggie, aged fifteen, and Catherine, or Katie, three years younger. A married sister, Leah Fish, a most important person in the history of Spiritualism,
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