Page:Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator (Collins, 1919).djvu/270

 light than that of old King Solomon himself. Thereupon Mr. Devant invited the audience to ply the immortal part of the departed wise man with any questions that might be fit and proper.

“Strangely enough while nobody believed in spirit communications as exemplified by the rapping table everybody was most anxious to ask some question which no one on this side of the borderland could answer. The replies that King Solomon rapped out were deep and philosophical although not always conforming to our ideas of ethics and morals. Indeed, his very first reply to a question, which was put by some guileless suffragette, nearly broke up the show. She asked him, as Bill Adams would say ‘as man to man,’ how many wives a man should have, and in that she thought she had trapped him even though he was beyond the pale of the law. But Solomon showed his superior wisdom as usual and rebuked the lady by rapping furiously on the table until he had nearly eight hundred wives to his credit.

“To convinee the audience that the table was just a common, single legged, three footed one of the milliner’s variety the conjurer invited a committee to step up on the stage and examine