As  I  have  said,  one  day  it  would  be  a  crime  of  a  lurid  or  sen-
sational character  that  would  arrest  and  compel  me  to  think,
and  the  same  day,  within  the  hour  perhaps,  it  would  be  a  lec-
turer or  religionist  with  some  finespun  theory  of  life,  some
theosophist  like  Annie  Besant,  who  in  passing  through  St.
Louis  on  a  lecture  tour  would  be  at  one  of  the  best  hotels,
usually  the  Southern,  talking  transmigration  and  Nirvana.
Again,  it  would  be  some  mountebank  or  quack  of  a  low  order —
a  spiritualist,  let  us  say,  of  the  Eva  Fay  stripe,  or  a  mind-
reader  like  Bishop,  or  a  third-rate  religionist  like  the  Rever-
end Sam  Jones,  who  was  then  in  his  heyday  preaching  un-
adulterated hell,  or  the  arrival  of  a  prize-fighter-actor  like
John  L.  Sullivan,  then  only  recently  defeated  by  Corbett,  or
a  novelist  of  the  quack  order,  such  as  Hall  Caine.
