He had not practiced as a medium for longer than ten or a dozen years.
He had discovered, by chance as he thought, that he possessed
mediumistic powers in an unusual degree, and had begun then to take up
the life as a profession. He had suffered, so far as he was aware, no
ill effects from this life, though he had seen others suffer; and, as
his fame grew, his income grew with 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 powers which
he possessed were genuine, and that the personages he seemed to come
across in his mediumistic efforts were what 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 must the spiritualist.
As he picked his way to his lodgings 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.
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