insect, as her husband contemptuously said. She, or somebody, decided to ask it questions. The answers were to be "Yes" or "No," expressed by a certain number of raps. The familiar ghost-story would suggest the catechism. Was it the soul of a murdered man? Had he been killed and buried in that house? To all these questions the answer was affirmative; but the careful reader of Mrs. Fish's later account of these things will hesitate to follow her when she says that her mother elicited the fact that it was the soul of a pedlar who had been murdered there and buried in the cellar. How many professions did she name to the ghost before she came to "pedlar"? In fact, the allied murderer, who was named, afterwards turned up in Hydesville (as Mrs. Hardinge says) and threw, not cold, but very hot water on the story. We shall see presently that Maggie Fox in later life described the story told to the public by her sister as a tissue of deliberate untruths.
The sounds were genuine enough, though the story that any bones were found—except those of a dead horse in the creek, as Katie disdainfully said—rests only on the word of Mrs. Fish. On March 31, Mrs. Fox called the whole village to come and hear. It is a naive picture. Some seventy or eighty people crowded into the one-storey cottage, listening with delicious shudders to the answers of the murdered pedlar, while the two children lay innocently in the bed. The ghost startled them by giving, in reply to questions, the age of each of the people present,
