After the usual inanities--"_I am sure you are pushing._" "No; _you_ are! _I saw your fingers pressing heavily._" "_Why, how extraordinary! that is exactly what I thought about you_," etc. etc., it was intimated that a spirit was there giving the name of George Eliot, so I put my question at once.
"I did not mean another year from October last--I referred to this year," was the answer.
"Shall I be able to write automatically?" was my next query.
"No; leave that alone--it would be very dangerous for you at present."
"Shall I be able to hear? Shall I become clair-audient?"
My next question naturally was: "Then shall I be able to _see_ very soon?"
"Yes; for you will become clairvoyant for the first time. Remember my warning to use but not abuse the gift."
Now I must explain that all this time a good deal of the usual kind of joking had been going on. Moreover, I felt intuitively that Mr Kitchener thought I was deceiving myself into the idea that human muscles could not account for the movements, and, in fact, the very worst possible conditions for getting anything of value were present.
So much so that I did not for one moment suppose that it was really George Eliot, or that she would countenance that particular sort of buffoonery, and the incident made no impression upon me at all. I had already taken my hands off the table, when someone--Mr Kitchener, I think--banged it down four times, and then triumphantly observed: "_Yes, of course, you will see somebody during the night, or rather at four o'clock in the morning, you see!_" The whole thing was the kind of fiasco I had expected, "degenerating into a romp," as poor Corney Grain used to remark about the "Lancers" and the stern old lady in the suburban villa.
The bathos of table turning had surely been reached when it came to banging the leg of the table down four times, and calmly announcing four o'clock as the time for my first vision!
But the remarkable point is that I _did_ have my first vision that night, though it had come and gone long before four A.M.
It is necessary to remember that the sun rises about three-thirty A.M. during the end of December or first week in January out there, so it would have been fairly light before four A.M.; whereas when I woke out of my first sleep that night, it was pitch dark.