Another war-correspondent at Versailles was the present Earl of Dunraven, then not quite thirty years of age, and known by the courtesy title of Lord Adare. He had previously acted as the _Daily Telegraph's_ representative with Napier's expedition against Theodore of Abyssinia, and was now staying at Versailles, on behalf, I think, of the same journal. His rooms at the Hôtel des Réservoirs were shared by Daniel Dunglas Home, the medium, with whom my father and myself speedily became acquainted. Very tall and slim, with blue eyes and an abundance of yellowish hair, Home, at this time about thirty-seven years of age, came of the old stock of the Earls of Home, whose name figures so often in Scottish history. His father was an illegitimate son of the tenth earl, and his mother belonged to a family which claimed to possess the gift of "second sight." Home himself--according to his own account--began to see visions and receive mysterious warnings at the period of his mother's death, and as time elapsed his many visitations from the other world so greatly upset the aunt with whom he was living--a Mrs. McNeill Cook of Greeneville, Connecticut [He had been taken from Scotland to America when he was about nine years old.]--that she ended by turning him out-of-doors. Other people, however, took an unhealthy delight in seeing their furniture move about without human agency, and in receiving more or less ridiculous messages from spirit-land; and in folk of this description Home found some useful friends.
He came to London in the spring of 1855, and on giving a _séance_ at Cox's Hotel, in Jermyn Street, he contrived to deceive Sir David Brewster (then seventy-four years old), but was less successful with another septuagenarian, Lord Brougham. Later, he captured the imaginative Sir Edward Bulwer (subsequently Lord Lytton), who as author of "Zanoni" was perhaps fated to believe in him, and he also impressed Mrs. Browning, but not Browning himself The latter, indeed, depicted Home as "Sludge, the Medium." Going to Italy for a time, the already notorious adventurer gave _séances_ in a haunted villa near Florence, but on becoming converted to the Catholic faith in 1856 he was received in private audience by that handsome, urbane, but by no means satisfactory pontiff, Pio Nono, who, however, eight years later caused him to be summarily expelled from Rome as a sorcerer in league with the Devil.