Very tall and slim, with blue eyes and an abundance of yellowish hair,
Home, at this time about thirty-seven years of age, came of the old stock
of the Earls of Home, whose name figures so often in Scottish history. His
father was an illegitimate son of the tenth earl, and his mother belonged
to a family which claimed to possess the gift of "second sight." Home
himself--according to his own account--began to see visions and receive
mysterious warnings at the period of his mother's death, and as time
elapsed his many visitations from the other world so greatly upset the
aunt with whom he was living--a Mrs. McNeill Cook of Greeneville,
Connecticut [He had been taken from Scotland to America when he was about
nine years old.]--that she ended by turning him out-of-doors. Other
people, however, took an unhealthy delight in seeing their furniture
move about without human agency, and in receiving more or less ridiculous
messages from spirit-land; and in folk of this description Home found some
useful friends.
He came to London in the spring of 1855, and on giving a _seance_ at Cox's
Hotel, in Jermyn Street, he contrived to deceive Sir David Brewster (then
seventy-four years old), but was less successful with another
septuagenarian, Lord Brougham.
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