It is not easy to feel
sure that we have certainly detected a fraud in a dim light; but it is
absurd to believe in a miracle, when the conditions of light are such
as to make detection difficult.
Given this mild young musical man, the problems of how he achieved his
social successes, and how he managed to escape exposure, if he did his
miracles by conjuring, are almost equally perplexing. The second
puzzle is perhaps the less hard of the two, for Home did not make
money as a medium (though he took money's worth), and in private
society few seized and held the mystic hands that moved about, or when
they seized they could not hold them. The hands melted away, so people
said.
A sketch of Home's life must now be given.[16] He was born in 1833, at
Currie, a village near Edinburgh. In his later years he sent to his
second wife a photograph of the street of cottages beside the burn, in
one of which he first saw the light. His father had a right to bear
the arms of the Earls of Home, with a _brisure_, being the natural son
of Alexander, tenth Earl of Home.[17] The Medium's ancestor had
fought, or, according to other accounts, had shirked fighting, at
Flodden Field, as is popularly known from the ballad _The Sutors of
Selkirk_.
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