They must by no means believe that Conjuring
and Ventriloquism are old trades. They must disbelieve all
Philosophical Transactions containing the records of painful and
careful inquiry into now familiar disorders of the senses of seeing
and hearing, and into the wonders of somnambulism, epilepsy,
hysteria, miasmatic influence, vegetable poisons derived by whole
communities from corrupted air, diseased imitation, and moral
infection. They must disbelieve all such awkward leading cases as
the case of the Woodstock Commissioners and their man, and the case
of the Identity of the Stockwell Ghost, with the maid-servant. They
must disbelieve the vanishing of champion haunted houses (except,
indeed, out of Mr. Howitt's book), represented to have been closed
and ruined for years, before one day's inquiry by four gentlemen
associated with this journal, and one hour's reference to the Local
Rate-books. They must disbelieve all possibility of a human
creature on the last verge of the dark bridge from Life to Death,
being mysteriously able, in occasional cases, so to influence the
mind of one very near and dear, as vividly to impress that mind with
some disturbed sense of the solemn change impending.
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