276 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



then walked out, he crying and begging to be loosed. 

 Thinking he would certainly overcome the influence we went 

 on, and coming back about two hours later we found the 

 man still on the ground, declaring he could not get up. On 

 a pass from my brother and his saying, " Now get up," he 

 rose easily. We gave him a small present, but he did not 

 seem much surprised or disturbed, evidently thinking we 

 were white medicine-men. Here, again, it seemed to me 

 pretty certain that the induced temporary paralysis was a 

 reality, and by no means due to the imagination of the 

 usually stolid Indian. 



During my eight years' travels in the East I heard occa- 

 sionally, through the newspapers, of the strange doings of the 

 spiritualists in America and England, some of which seemed 

 to me too wild and outre to be anything but the ravings of 

 madmen. Others, however, appeared to be so well authenti- 

 cated that I could not at all understand them, but concluded, 

 as most people do at first, that such things must be either 

 imposture or delusion. How I became first acquainted with 

 the phenomena and the effect they produced upon me are fully 

 described in the " Notes of Personal Evidence," in my book 

 on " Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," to which I refer my 

 readers. I will only state here that I was so fortunate as to 

 be able to see the simpler phenomena, such as rapping and 

 tapping sounds and slight movements of a table in a friend's 

 house, with no one present but his family and myself, and 

 that we were able to test the facts so thoroughly as to 

 demonstrate that they were not produced by the physical 

 action of any one of us. Afterwards, in my own house, 

 similar phenomena were obtained scores of times, and I was 

 able to apply tests which showed that they were not caused 

 by any one present. A few years later I formed one of the 

 committee of the Dialectical Society, and again witnessed, 

 under test conditions, similar phenomena in great variety, 

 and in these three cases, it must be remembered, no paid 

 mediums were present, and every means that could be sug- 

 gested of excluding trickery or the direct actions of any one 

 present were resorted to. 



