Regarding the women in his boarding house visiting a spiritual medium. Transcription: [surpri]sed if he [Fitz James O ?Brien] anticipated us &c. This is an old dodge of O'Brien ?s. His wide-eyed, confident 'My dear fellow, it's been done before!' or 'I had precisely the same idea!' was so well known that [George] Arnold and [Frank] Cahill used to play upon it by informing him of improbable plots for plays which they (never) intended to write, when it always appeared that O'B's luxuriant imagination had anticipated them! Not that the idea of sketching the eating-houses of New York is a very ou
Regarding the women in his boarding house visiting a spiritual medium. Transcription: [surpri]sed if he [Fitz James O ?Brien] anticipated us &c. This is an old dodge of O'Brien ?s. His wide-eyed, confident 'My dear fellow, it's been done before!' or 'I had precisely the same idea!' was so well known that [George] Arnold and [Frank] Cahill used to play upon it by informing him of improbable plots for plays which they (never) intended to write, when it always appeared that O'B's luxuriant imagination had anticipated them! Not that the idea of sketching the eating-houses of New York is a very out of the way one ? anybody might have hit upon it. But 'tis a pet trick of O'Brien's. Up town. Writing. / Rawson [Gill] has told Mrs [Catharine] Potter that he thinks his mother [Elizabeth Gouverneur] is going to get married. / The want of discrimination in judgment of character in one style of women is curious. There was talk to-day over the breakfast table of the expose of the 'Swill-milk' business in Frank Leslie's paper. Mrs Potter let fall a remark intimating that nothing could be true coming from that source. She has heard us talking of F. L. at table, that his real name's Bob Carter &c and ? consequently ? thinks it equally due to her sense of morality and judgment to come to that conclusion! Exquisite feminine logic! And she plumes herself on it, too! Some time back all the women in the house went Spiritual Medium-izing, being bitten, in the first place by Mrs Patten. Mrs Potter went in for it, going more than once as bottle-holder to others. And certainly the accounts they brought back of the woman ? Mrs Porter's ? performances were singular. She spelt out names, told some particulars of lives &c amid a good deal of nonsense, vulgarity and occasional obscenity. It was quite the topic Title: Thomas Butler Gunn Diaries: Volume 9, page 140, May 4, 1858 . 4 May 1858. Gunn, Thomas Butler, 1826-1903
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