Page:Spiritualism-1920.djvu/136

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HOME'S FAMOUS LEVITATION
131

Weekly Dispatch, no one claims to have seen Home "wafted from one window to another." They sat in a dark room in a state of great nervous excitement. Home had (as he usually did) told them, jauntily, that he was going to be borne from one window to another, and they were naturally concerned. Instead of going to the window. Lord Crawford, to whom Home told what was about to happen, actually sat with his back to the window, some distance from it. He says that he saw Home's shadow on the wall "in a horizontal position." Lord Dunraven merely saw Home "standing upright outside our window"; and he admits that there was a balcony nineteen inches wide outside. Lord Dunraven adds that he went into the other room with Home, and told him that he could not see how he could have gone out by that window. Home thereupon told him to "stand a little distance off," and swung himself out, rapidly, and in again. "It was so dark," Lord Dunraven says, "that I could not see clearly how he was supported outside."

As I have said of Home's earlier levitations, no one even claims (apart from the extraordinary illusion of Dr. Hallock) to have seen him floating in the air quite detached from any solid support. The evidence is worthless; but the report which was now propagated, of a medium floating in the air eighty-five feet—so Lord Crawford said: it was the third floor, and more probably half that height—above the ground in Victoria Street, attracted sensational interest. Home went on from marvel to marvel. His body