Long had the company sat in silent suspense, the solid piece of furniture--round-topped, and supported by a stout pedestal and claw feet resting on mahogany lions' backs--refusing to make a sign; but no sooner was my influence brought to bear upon it than it began to creak and groan, and was presently lumbering like a Wombwell elephant about the room, with us after it, scrambling over stools and other impedimenta to hold fast to it as long as possible. In recording events of so long ago, and particularly a matter of this kind, I wish to make full allowance for unconscious exaggeration; but that the table was declared too heavy to be pushed into such movements, and that I was frequently sent for to start them when older hands failed to do so, are circumstances that seem particularly clear to me.
I suppose, as my fellow-tableturners said at the time, there must have been "something" in me, as well as in "it," if I have rightly described what happened. I mentioned in my "Thirty Years in Australia" a German doctor who in his old age became a spiritualist, and tried hard to persuade me to lend myself to séance purposes, because, he said, I had that in me which marked me out as a medium. Might it possibly have been the same "something" that he divined? Well, I neither know nor care. The little mysteries are all embraced in the big Mystery, which would not be mysterious if we had the power to understand it. I was always that kind of a sceptic which believes in there being a reason for everything. When I was a girl I saw ghosts--unmistakably visible ghosts--and even in their presence, certain that they could not be flesh and blood creatures, and paralysed with horror to know it, I was able to keep this attitude of mind. Since nothing else ailed me that I knew of, I said to myself, "I am going mad"; and I was quite correct in my diagnosis, since what was really happening to me was the beginning of brain fever. I never had or showed the slightest leaning towards or interest in so-called supernatural phenomena. Occult "science" is to me what Mrs Harris was to Betsy Prig. The table-turning craze soon passed, as far as my people were concerned, and I never, even to that extent, dabbled in the black arts again.