One of his less perilous attempts at the miraculous, I remember was this: he brought a street Arab into his drawing-room, and put a half-crown down on the carpet for him to pick up if he could, and keep for himself; however, this the boy found, to his wonderment, to be practically impossible, seeing that Mr.Howell had secretly willed that he could not and should not pick up the prize.

But such efforts of a man's strong will are well evidenced in numerous other instances, and serve to prove that no spiritual interferences beyond our noble selves are essential to such mysteries.
Amongst other reminiscences of the marvellous, I may refer to a private exhibition in the Berners Street Hotel, to which I was invited by Mrs.
Washington Phillips (of whom more anon), to investigate Mr.Vernon's influence over a little girl some twelve years old.

The child's specialty was an alleged capability of reading without eyesight, the back of her head low down on the nape doing duty in the way of vision.
To omit numerous other successful examples (some failing, which I thought so far evidences of the absence of collusion), I will detail my own conclusive experiment.

But let me anticipate an objection relating to the exhibitor himself.

Some of our party, a very distinguished one, and known to each other, kept Mr.Vernon in conversation at a distance, while the child was reading our thoughts, or the actual words of print unknown to ourselves, quite independently of his manipulations; he having first comatised her into a mesmeric state of trance.