At length, however, as the toe did not vanish under my steady gaze, I
thought I might as well change my tactics, and remembering that all
midnight invaders, be they thieves, ghosts or devils, dislike nothing
so much as a good noise I shouted out in a loud voice:

“Who’s there?”

The toe immediately disappeared in the darkness. Almost simultaneously with my words I leaped out of bed and rushed
toward the place where I had beheld the strange appearance. The next
instant I ran against something and felt an iron grip round my body. After this I have no distinct recollection of what occurred, excepting
that a fearful struggle ensued between me and my unseen opponent; that
every now and then we were violently hurled to the floor, from which we
always rose again in an instant, locked in a deadly embrace; that we
tugged and strained and pulled and pushed, I in the convulsive and
frantic energy of a fight for life, he (for by this time I had
discovered that the intruder was a human being) actuated by some passion
of which I was ignorant; that we whirled round and round, cheek to cheek
and arm to arm, in fierce contest, until the room appeared to whiz round
with us, and that at least a dozen people (my fellow traveler among
them), roused, I suppose, by our repeated falls, came pouring into the
room with lights and showed me struggling with a man having nothing on
but a shirt, whose long, tangled hair and wild, unsettled eyes told me
he was insane. And then, for the first time, I became aware that I had
received in the conflict several gashes from a knife, which my opponent
still held in his hand. To conclude my story in a few words (for I daresay all of you by this
time are getting very tired), it turned out that my midnight visitor was
a madman who was being conveyed to a lunatic asylum at The Hague, and
that he and his keeper had been obliged to stop at Delft on their way. The poor fellow had contrived during the night to escape from his
keeper, who had carelessly forgotten to lock the door of his chamber,
and with that irresistible desire to shed blood peculiar to many insane
people had possessed himself of a pocketknife belonging to the man who
had charge of him, entered my room, which was most likely the only one
in the house unfastened, and was probably meditating the fatal stroke
when I saw his toe in the moonlight, the rest of his body being hidden
in the shade. After this terrible freak of his he was watched with much greater
strictness, but I ought to observe, as some excuse for the keeper’s
negligence, that this was the first act of violence he had ever
attempted. MRS. DAVENPORT’S GHOST. BY FREDERICK F. SCHRADER. Dear readers, do you agree with Hamlet? Do you believe that there is
more between heaven and earth than we dream of in our philosophy? Does
it seem possible to you that Eliphas Levy conjured up the shade of
Apollonius of Tyana, the prophet of the Magii, in a London hotel, and
that the great sage, William Crookes, drank his tea at breakfast several
days a week, for months in succession, in the society of the
materialized spirit of a young lady, attired in white linen, with a
feather turban on her head? Do not laugh! Panic would seize you in the presence even of a turbaned
spirit, and the grotesque spectacle would but intensify your terror. As
for me, I did not laugh last night on reading an account in a New York
newspaper of a criminal trial that will probably terminate in the death
penalty of the accused. It is a sad case. I shudder as I transcribe the records of the trial
from the testimony of the hotel waiter, who heard the conversation of
the two confederates through a keyhole, and of forty thoroughly
credible witnesses, who testified to the same facts. What would be my
feelings if I had seen the beautiful victim with the gaping wound in her
breast, into which she dipped her finger to mark the brow of her
murderer? I. About three o’clock on the afternoon of February 3, Professor Davenport
and Miss Ida Soutchotte, a very pale and delicate young girl, who had
submitted to the tests of Professor Davenport for a number of years,
were finishing their dinner in their room in the second story of a New
York hotel. Professor Benjamin Davenport was a celebrity, but it was
said that he owed his fame to somewhat questionable means. The leading
spiritualists did not repose the confidence in him that manifestly
marked their regard for William Crookes or Daniel Douglas Home. “Greedy and unscrupulous mediums,” the author of Spiritualism in America
thinks, “are to blame for the most bitter attacks to which our cause has
been exposed. When the materializations do not take place as quickly as
circumstances require, they resort to trickery and fraud to extricate
themselves from a dilemma.”

Professor Benjamin Davenport belonged to these “versatile” mediums. Aside from this, queer stories were afloat about him. He was secretly
accused of highway robbery in South America, cheating at cards in the
gambling houses of San Francisco, and the overhasty use of firearms
toward persons who had never offended him. It was said almost openly,
that the professor’s wife had died from abuse and grief at his
infidelity. But in spite of these annoying rumors, Mr. Davenport, by
virtue of his skill as a fraud and fakir, continued to exercise a great
deal of influence upon certain plain and simple-minded folks, whom it
was impossible to convince that they had not touched the materialized
spirits of their brothers, mothers, or sisters through the agency of his
wonderful power. His professional success received material accession
from his swarthy, Mephisto-like countenance, his deep, fiery eyes, his
large curved nose, the cynical expression of his mouth, and the lofty,
almost prophetic tone of his words. When the waiter had made his last visit--he did not go far--the
following conversation took place in the room:

“There is to be a seance this evening at the residence of Mrs. Harding,”
began the medium. “Quite a number of influential people will be there,
and two or three millionaires. Conceal under your skirt the blonde
woman’s wig and the white material in which the spirits usually make
their appearance.”

“Very well,” replied Ida Soutchotte, in a resigned tone. The waiter heard her pace the room. After a pause, she asked:

“Whose spirit are you going to control this evening, Benjamin?”

The waiter heard a loud, brutal laugh and the chair groaning beneath the
weight of the demonstrative professor. “Guess.”

“How should I know?” she asked. “I am going to conjure up the spirit of my dead wife.”

And another burst of laughter issued from the room, full of sinister
levity. A cry of terror burst from Ida’s lips. A muffled sound indicated
to the eavesdropper at the door that she was dragging herself to the
feet of the professor. “Benjamin, Benjamin! don’t do it,” she sobbed. “Why not? They say I broke Mrs. Davenport’s heart.