Without presuming to go Mr. Howitt's
length of considering this by any means a marvellous experience, we
yet venture to confess that it has awakened in our mind many
interesting speculations touching the present whereabout in space,
of the spirits of Mr. Howitt's own departed boots and hats.
The next articles of belief are Belief in the moderate figures of
"thirty thousand media in the United States in 1853"; and in two
million five hundred thousand spiritualists in the same country of
composed minds, in 1855, "professing to have arrived at their
convictions of spiritual communication from personal experience";
and in "an average rate of increase of three hundred thousand per
annum", still in the same country of calm philosophers. Belief in
spiritual knockings, in all manner of American places, and, among
others, in the house of "a Doctor Phelps at Stratford, Connecticut,
a man of the highest character for intelligence", says Mr. Howitt,
and to whom we willingly concede the possession of far higher
intelligence than was displayed by his spiritual knocker, in
"frequently cutting to pieces the clothes of one of his boys", and
in breaking "seventy-one panes of glass"--unless, indeed, the
knocker, when in the body, was connected with the tailoring and
glazing interests.
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