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Updated: June 11, 2025
"Well, it was only about two weeks after that, I was practising and Mother was rubbing down a table she was fixing over. Nobody else happened to be at home. Cousin Parnelia came in, her old battered black straw hat on one ear as usual. She was all stirred up and pleased about a new 'method' of using planchette. You know what planchette is, don't you?
Draper or Jermain, to acknowledge her connection with him, or with Cousin Parnelia, or with any of the eccentrics who frequented her parents' home, and whom it was physically impossible to imagine drinking tea at Mrs. Draper's table. It was beside this same table that she met, one day in early December, Jermain Fiske's distinguished father.
Cousin Parnelia put one deeply veined, shrunken old hand on planchette and the other over her eyes and waited, her wrinkled, commonplace old face assuming a solemn expression of importance. The clock ticked loudly. Planchette began to write at first in meaningless flourishes, then with occasional words, and finally Sylvia saw streaming away from the pencil the usual loose, scrawling handwriting.
And anyhow, he only comes here because he has to part of his job. He doesn't like the freaks any better than I do. The last time he was here, I heard Cousin Parnelia trying to persuade him to have planchette write him a message from Abraham Lincoln. Isn't she the limit, anyhow!"
Although he had a dramatic sympathy for her sorrow, Professor Marshall's greater vivacity of temperament made it harder for him than for his wife to keep a straight face when Cousin Parnelia proposed to be the medium whereby he might converse with Milton or Homer.
She received the President's condescending, oleaginous hand-shake with a qualm at his loud oratorical voice and plebeian accent, and she headed Cousin Parnelia off from a second mediumistic attack, hating her badly adjusted false-front of hair as intensely as ever Loyola hated a heretic.
"I will read it to you," said Cousin Parnelia, and she read aloud in her monotonous, illiterate voice: "'I am well and happy, dearest Elliott, and never far from you. When you call to me, I hear you. All is not yet clear, but I wish I could tell you more of the whole meaning. I am near you this moment. I wish that The message stopped there," explained Cousin Parnelia, laying down the paper.
But Mother it was so like her! the first time Cousin Parnelia happened to come to the house, Mother picked up the deed from her desk and said offhand, 'Oh, Parnelia, we bought the little Garens house for you, and handed her the paper, and went to talking about cutworms or Bordeaux mixture." "I see her. I see your mother Vermont to the core."
"Just after the clock struck two she wrote the loveliest message for you with planchette. Sylvia tore it up. But I'm sure that if we try with faith, she will repeat it ..." Professor Marshall's eyes were fixed on his wife's old cousin. "Come in," he said in a hoarse voice. They were almost the first words Sylvia had heard him say. Cousin Parnelia hastened up the path to the house.
I remember I cried a little. But Mother never said a word just sat there in that quiet autumn sunshine, watching the leaves falling falling and I had to do as she did. And by and by I felt, just as she did, that Cousin Parnelia was only a very small part of something very big.
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