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He had not practiced as a er than ten or a dozen years He had discovered, by chance as he thought, that he possessed un then to take up the life as a profession He had suffered, so far as he are, no ill effects froh he had seen others suffer; and, as his fareith it

It is necessary, then, to understand that he was not a conscious charlatan; he loathed mechanical tricks such as he occasionally came across; he was perfectly and serenely convinced that the pohich he possessed were genuine, and that the personages he seemed to come across in his mediumistic efforts hat they professed to be; that they were not hallucinatory, that they were not the products of fraud, that they were not necessarily evil He regarded this religion as he regarded science; both were progressive, both liable to error, both capable of abuse Yet as a scientist did not shrink from experiment for fear of risk, neither s on the north of the park, he was thinking about Laurie Baxter That this boy possessed in an unusual degree what he would have called "occult powers" was very evident to him That these powers involved a certain risk was evident too He proposed, therefore, to take all reasonable precautions All the catastrophes he had witnessed in the past were due, he thought, to a too rapid development of those powers, or to inexperience He detero slowly

First, the boy must be convinced; next, he ion must be knocked out of him; fourthly, he must be trained and developed But for the present he o into trance if it could be prevented It was plain, he thought, that Laurie had a very strong "affinity," as he would have said, with the diseent" His co nature in its rapidity and perfection Real progress h this channel

Yes; I arotesque nonsense

II

Laurie came back to town in a condition of interior quietness that rather astonished hiie that he was not convinced; and that was true so far as he knew Intellectually, the spiritualistic theory was at present only the hypothesis that seemed the most reasonable; yetin the world And this showed itself by the quietness in which he found his soul plunged