The Star. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1897. A GRACELESS SPOOK. STEAD AND HIS JULIA.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6048, 8 December 1897, Page 2

The Star. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1897. A GRACELESS SPOOK. STEAD AND HIS JULIA.

A SPIRITUALISTIC KNOCKDOWN. [From Our Correspondent.! LONDON, Oct. 30. Dismay will, [ fear, agitate the bosoms of Australian and New Zealand spiritualists, when they learn that Mr Stead has gone back on his faithful Julia, and means to drop Borderland. Yet the fact ought not to cause much astonishment. The severest critics of the good man never called in question his business aptitude. It is as pronounced as his journalistic acumen. No spook — blessed, or accursed —could induce him to hang on to a j financial failure. " Lord help us to make the world a little better," he prays, " but . take care we do it on sound commercial principles." "When one of Mr Stead's philanthropic enterprises loses money, conscience soon demands its extinction. Borderland doesn't pay, therefore, despite its lofty mission, Borderland must go. Personally, I never did believe in Julia as a permanent draw. There can be no question that her disi covery, and the announcement that she would from time to time communicate I with this sublunary sphere through innocent and unconscious Mr Stead was I A GREAT STROKE. I It must have sent up the circulation of i the Review of Reviews thousands at the time. Eut our able editor overdoes his j sensations. He overdid Julia. Her language soon bore a paralysing resemblance !to his own. Even the faithful Steadites I found themselves impaled on the horns of an awful dilemma.- Either Julia Avas a 1 bold, bad spook, " cabbaging " her ideas from Mr Stead, and then palming them off as her own through the good man's automatic hand, or else the latter himself was a . Can you think of a suitable word ? No wonder the Nonconformist conscience suffered twinges. Mv Stead heard that it was unwell, and fell ill himself. HIS DOCTOR ADVISED that automatic handwriting was a relaxation dangerous to highly neurotic temperaments, and Mrs Stead insisted that the flirtation with Julia should cease. For twelve months Mr Stead remained severely rational. Then the dwindling circulation of Borderland imperatively demanding action, he revived Julia. In the interval, feeling hurt at her automatic hand's inertia, the spook had been, to— shall we say— blazes. She ought to have been full of delightfully sultry experiences. But she wasn't. Alas ! Julia only seemed more like sermonising Stead than ever. She ungratefully sealed Borderland's fate. Thus was Mr Stead's self -sacrifice in becoming an automatic writer for a graceless spook rewarded.