You were at the bottom, a wreck, almost before you knew it. So it was in
this case. Every thing was swept away, a mountain of unpaid debts was
piled up, credit was gone, clamor of creditors deafened him, and the
gaunt wolf of actual want looked in through the door of the cottage upon
the dear wife and little ones. Another shadow, and a yet darker one,
settled upon them. The unhappy man had been tampering with the delusion
of spiritualism, and his wife had been drawn with him into a partial
belief in its vagaries. In their troubles they sought the aid of the
"familiar spirits" that peeped and muttered through speaking, writing,
and rapping mediums. This kept them in a state of morbid excitement that
increased from day to day until they were wrought up to a tension that
verged on insanity. The lying spirits; or the frenzy of his own heated
brain, turned his thought to death as the only escape from want.
"I see our way out of these troubles, wife," he said one night, as they
sat hand in hand in the bedchamber, where the children were lying
asleep. "We will all die together! This has been revealed to me as the
solution of all our difficulties. Yes, we will enter the beautiful
spirit-world together! This is freedom! It is only getting out of
prison.
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