'Twixt two worlds : a narrative of the life and work of William Eglinton

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Tzvixt Two* Worlds.
house, with several friends. He asked me to select a blank card from a parcel, and examine
it. He tore off a large corner, which I put in my waistcoat pocket, and then he laid the card,
with a lead pencil, on the centre of the table, and asked me to turn off the gas. We held
each other's hands round the table, in total darkness and perfect silence. In a few moments
I heard the sounds of a lead pencil on paper, but moving so rapidly that its strokes resembled
the beating of rapid machinery. It was like the rattle one can make in the mouth— the long
roll of an r when the end of the tongue is free. In about a minute—certainly less than
two minutes, and, I think, less than one—the sounds ceased, and a light was called for by
raps upon the table. I lighted the gas, took up the card, and fitted it to the torn-off corner.
Upon it was the " Ecce Homo"—the head surrounded by a full triple halo, drawn with
wonderful power, and with a number of pencil strokes and touches impossible to count, and
but imperfectly indicated in this engraving. Portions of the halo became damaged by careless
fingers, but in a good light the three circles of beautiful cones can be made out on the
pencil drawing ; each cone requiring many strokes of the pencil. Considering that the whole
was done in about one minute and in total darkness, it seems to me one of the most
wonderful things I have ever seen. The engraving shows but one full circle of the middle
of the three halos, and a few cones of the outer one ; but the original drawing, spoiled as it
was before I protected it with a wash of gum tragacanth, has three distinct circles. The
signature, " Willie," is the same as the others.
I do not pretend for a moment that these are perfect drawings. They are the work
of a self-taught little girl, who departed this life in her fifteenth year. In her last days she
amused herself with drawing trees she could see from her window, and portraits of children
she loved. When she became too weak for this exertion, she held the pencil, and her hand,
she said, drew of itself, and with no conscious effort on her part, very strange and beautiful
things, which she looked at with great interest and enjoyment. They came to her as
beautiful poems came in her sleep. Since she left us, she has appeared to cheer us
whenever she has had the conditions which have enabled her to do so. With different
mediums, and when there has been no one but her father and mother in the room, she has
come in her materialised body, so that we have seen, and heard, and felt her, beyond the
possibility of doubt. We cannot be more certain of anything in this world, than we are
certain that our child has many times appeared to us in her own bodily form, and made
herself evident to us by all the senses with which we usually become conscious of objective
realities. We are as certain of her continued existence, and of her occasional visible and
tangible presence, as we are of any of the persons and things we daily see, hear, or feel,
and in the same way and with the same certainty.
We can form so little idea of the mode of writing on carefully enveloped slates, or on
paper enclosed in the space between them, or on cards laid between the leaves of a thick
book, and while pressed with a heavy weight, that very good testimony is required to make
credible such seeming impossibilities ; and I never unlock the drawer of my writing-desk to
show these evidences of spirit power without the uncomfortable feeling that I raise a question
of personal veracity, and run the risk of being considered—not a fanatic, but a deceiver—
teller of untruths. The hypothesis that 1 have been a victim of deception— fool instead of
knave—does not fit the case. The ci;cumstances compel the belief of one of two things.