# Nightmare Tales

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-18 — 1 clipping.*

---

> Note: Words in italics have been surrounded with _underscores_ and
> bold with =signs=. Small capitals have been changed to all capitals.
> A more extensive transcriber’s note can be found at the end of this
> book.
> 
>   NIGHTMARE TALES
> 
>   [Illustration: THE ARYAN THEOSOPHICAL PRESS
>                    Point Loma, California]
> 
>   NIGHTMARE TALES
> 
>   _By_
> 
>   H. P. BLAVATSKY
> 
>   The Aryan Theosophical Press
>   Point Loma, California,
>   U. S. A.
>   1907
> 
> CONTENTS
> 
>                                PAGE
>   A BEWITCHED LIFE                1
> 
>   THE CAVE OF THE ECHOES         65
> 
>   THE LUMINOUS SHIELD            81
> 
>   FROM THE POLAR LANDS           95
> 
>   THE ENSOULED VIOLIN           103
> 
> [Illustration]
> 
> A BEWITCHED LIFE
> 
> (As Narrated by a Quill Pen)
> 
> INTRODUCTION
> 
> It was a dark, chilly night in September, 1884. A heavy gloom had
> descended over the streets of A——, a small town on the Rhine, and was
> hanging like a black funeral-pall over the dull factory burgh. The
> greater number of its inhabitants, wearied by their long day’s work,
> had hours before retired to stretch their tired limbs, and lay their
> aching heads upon their pillows. All was quiet in the large house; all
> was quiet in the deserted streets.
> 
> I too was lying in my bed; alas, not one of rest, but of pain and
> sickness, to which I had been confined for some days. So still was
> everything in the house, that, as Longfellow has it, its stillness
> seemed almost audible. I could plainly hear the murmur of the blood,
> as it rushed through my aching body, producing that monotonous
> singing so familiar to one who lends a watchful ear to silence. I had
> listened to it until, in my nervous imagination, it had grown into
> the sound of a distant cataract, the fall of mighty waters ... when,
> suddenly changing its character, the ever growing “singing” merged
> into other and far more welcome sounds. It was the low, and at first
> scarce audible, whisper of a human voice. It approached, and gradually
> strengthening seemed to speak in my very ear. Thus sounds a voice
> speaking across a blue quiescent lake, in one of those wondrously
> acoustic gorges of the snow-capped mountains, where the air is so pure
> that a word pronounced half a mile off seems almost at the elbow.
> Yes; it was the voice of one whom to know is to reverence; of one, to
> me, owing to many mystic associations, most dear and holy; a voice
> familiar for long years and ever welcome: doubly so in hours of mental
> or physical suffering, for it always brings with it a ray of hope and
> consolation.
> 
> “Courage,” it whispered in gentle, mellow tones. “Think of the days
> passed by you in sweet associations; of the great lessons received of
> Nature’s truths; of the many errors of men concerning these truths;
> and try to add to them the experience of a night in this city. Let the
> narrative of a strange life, that will interest you, help to shorten
> the hours of suffering.... Give your attention. Look yonder before you!”
> 
> “Yonder” meant the clear, large windows of an empty house on the other
> side of the narrow street of the German town. They faced my own in
> almost a straight line across the street, and my bed faced the windows
> of my sleeping room. Obedient to the suggestion, I directed my gaze
> towards them, and what I saw made me for the time being forget the
> agony of the pain that racked my swollen arm and rheumatical body.
> 
> Over the windows was creeping a mist; a dense, heavy, serpentine,
> whitish mist, that looked like the huge shadow of a gigantic boa slowly
> uncoiling its body. Gradually it disappeared, to leave a lustrous
> light, soft and silvery, as though the window-panes behind reflected
> a thousand moonbeams, a tropical star-lit sky—first from outside,
> then from within the empty rooms. Next I saw the mist elongating
> itself and throwing, as it were, a fairy bridge across the street
> from the bewitched windows to my own balcony, nay to my very own bed.
> As I continued gazing, the wall and windows and the opposite house
> itself, suddenly vanished. The space occupied by the empty rooms had
> changed into the interior of another smaller room, in what I knew to
> be a Swiss châlet—into a study, whose old, dark walls were covered
> from floor to ceiling with book shelves on which were many antiquated
> folios, as well as works of a more recent date. In the center stood
> a large old-fashioned table, littered over with manuscripts and
> writing materials. Before it, quill-pen in hand, sat an old man; a
> grim-looking, skeleton-like personage, with a face so thin, so pale,
> yellow and emaciated, that the light of the solitary little student’s
> lamp was reflected in two shining spots on his high cheek-bones, as
> though they were carved out of ivory.
> 
> As I tried to get a better view of him by slowly raising myself upon my
> pillows, the whole vision, châlet and study, desk, books and scribe,
> seemed to flicker and move. Once set in motion they approached nearer
> and nearer, until, gliding noiselessly along the fleecy bridge of
> clouds across the street, they floated through the closed windows into
> my room and finally seemed to settle beside my bed.
> 
> [Illustration: “I NOTICED A LIGHT FLASHING FROM UNDER HIS PEN, A BRIGHT
> COLORED SPARK THAT BECAME INSTANTANEOUSLY A SOUND. IT WAS THE SMALL
> VOICE OF THE QUILL.”]
> 
> “Listen to what he thinks and is going to write”—said in soothing tones
> the same familiar, far off, and yet near voice. “Thus you will hear a
> narrative, the telling of which may help to shorten the long sleepless
> hours, and even make you forget for a while your pain.... Try!”—it
> added, using the well-known Rosicrucian and Kabalistic formula.
> 
> I tried, doing as I was bid. I centered all my attention on the
> solitary laborious figure that I saw before me, but which did not
> see me. At first, the noise of the quill-pen with which the old man
> was writing, suggested to my mind nothing more than a low whispered
> murmur of a nondescript nature. Then, gradually, my ear caught the
> indistinct words of a faint and distant voice, and I thought the figure
> before me, bending over its manuscript, was reading its tale aloud
> instead of writing it. But I soon found out my error. For casting my
> gaze at the old scribe’s face, I saw at a glance that his lips were
> compressed and motionless, and the voice too thin and shrill to be his
> voice. Stranger still, at every word traced by the feeble, aged hand,
> I noticed a light flashing from under his pen, a bright colored spark
> that became instantaneously a sound, or—what is the same thing—it
> seemed to do so to my inner perceptions. It was indeed the small voice
> of the quill that I heard, though scribe and pen were at the time,
> perchance, hundreds of miles away from Germany. Such things will happen
> occasionally, especially at night, beneath whose starry shade, as Byron
> tells us, we
> 
>     ... learn the language of another world ...
> 
> However it may be, the words uttered by the quill remained in my memory
> for days after. Nor had I any great difficulty in retaining them, for
> when I sat down to record the story, I found it, as usual, indelibly
> impressed on the astral tablets before my inner eye.
> 
> Thus, I had but to copy it and so give it as I received it. I failed to
> learn the name of the unknown nocturnal writer. Nevertheless, though
> the reader may prefer to regard the whole story as one made up for the
> occasion, a dream, perhaps, still its incidents will, I hope, prove
> none the less interesting.
> 
> I
> 
> THE STRANGER’S STORY
> 
> My birth-place is a small mountain hamlet, a cluster of Swiss cottages,
> hidden deep in a sunny nook, between two tumble-down glaciers and a
> peak covered with eternal snows. Thither, thirty-seven years ago, I
> returned—crippled mentally and physically—to die, if death would only
> have me. The pure invigorating air of my birth-place decided otherwise.
> I am still alive; perhaps for the purpose of giving evidence to facts
> I have kept profoundly secret from all—a tale of horror I would rather
> hide than reveal. The reason for this unwillingness on my part is due
> to my early education, and to subsequent events that gave the lie to
> my most cherished prejudices. Some people might be inclined to regard
> these events as providential: I, however, believe in no Providence, and
> yet am unable to attribute them to mere chance. I connect them as the
> ceaseless evolution of effects, engendered by certain direct causes,
> with one primary and fundamental cause, from which ensued all that
> followed. A feeble old man am I now, yet physical weakness has in no
> way impaired my mental faculties. I remember the smallest details of
> that terrible cause, which engendered such fatal results. It is these
> which furnish me with an additional proof of the actual existence of
> one whom I fain would regard—oh, that I could do so!--as a creature
> born of my fancy, the evanescent production of a feverish, horrid
> dream! Oh that terrible, mild and all-forgiving, that saintly and
> respected Being! It was that paragon of all the virtues who embittered
> my whole existence. It is he, who, pushing me violently out of the
> monotonous but secure groove of daily life, was the first to force upon
> me the certitude of a life hereafter, thus adding an additional horror
> to one already great enough.
> 
> With a view to a clearer comprehension of the situation, I must
> interrupt these recollections with a few words about myself. Oh how, if
> I could, would I obliterate that hated _Self_!
> 
> Born in Switzerland, of French parents, who centered the whole
> world-wisdom in the literary trinity of Voltaire, J. J. Rousseau
> and D’Holbach, and educated in a German university, I grew up a
> thorough materialist, a confirmed atheist. I could never have even
> pictured to myself any beings—least of all a Being—above or even
> outside visible nature, as distinguished from her. Hence I regarded
> everything that could not be brought under the strictest analysis of
> the physical senses as a mere chimera. A soul, I argued, even supposing
> man has one, must be material. According to Origen’s definition,
> _incorporeus_[1]—the epithet he gave to his God—signifies a substance
> only more subtle than that of physical bodies, of which, at best,
> we can form no definite idea. How then can that, of which our senses
> cannot enable us to obtain any clear knowledge, how can that make
> itself visible or produce any tangible manifestations?
> 
>       [1] ἀσώματος.
> 
> Accordingly, I received the tales of nascent Spiritualism with a
> feeling of utter contempt, and regarded the overtures made by certain
> priests with derision, often akin to anger. And indeed the latter
> feeling has never entirely abandoned me.
> 
> Pascal, in the eighth Act of his “Thoughts,” confesses to a most
> complete incertitude upon the existence of God. Throughout my life, I
> too professed a complete certitude as to the non-existence of any such
> extra-cosmic being, and repeated with that great thinker the memorable
> words in which he tells us: “I have examined if this God of whom all
> the world speaks might not have left some marks of himself. I look
> everywhere, and everywhere I see nothing but obscurity. Nature offers
> me nothing that may not be a matter of doubt and inquietude.” Nor
> have I found to this day anything that might unsettle me in precisely
> similar and even stronger feelings. I have never believed, nor shall
> I ever believe, in a Supreme Being. But at the potentialities of man,
> proclaimed far and wide in the East, powers so developed in some
> persons as to make them virtually Gods, at them I laugh no more. My
> whole broken life is a protest against such negation. I believe in such
> phenomena, and—I curse them, whenever they come, and by whatsoever
> means generated.
> 
> On the death of my parents, owing to an unfortunate lawsuit, I lost the
> greater part of my fortune, and resolved—for the sake of those I loved
> best, rather than for my own—to make another for myself. My elder
> sister, whom I adored, had married a poor man. I accepted the offer of
> a rich Hamburg firm and sailed for Japan as its junior partner.
> 
> For several years my business went on successfully. I got into the
> confidence of many influential Japanese, through whose protection I
> was enabled to travel and transact business in many localities, which,
> in those days especially, were not easily accessible to foreigners.
> Indifferent to every religion, I became interested in the philosophy
> of Buddhism, the only religious system I thought worthy of being
> called philosophical. Thus, in my moments of leisure, I visited the
> most remarkable temples of Japan, the most important and curious of
> the ninety-six Buddhist monasteries of Kioto. I have examined in
> turn Day-Bootzoo, with its gigantic bell; Tzeonene, Enarino-Yassero,
> Kie-Missoo, Higadzi-Hong-Vonsi, and many other famous temples.
> 
> Several years passed away, and during that whole period I was not
> cured of my scepticism, nor did I ever contemplate having my opinions
> on this subject altered. I derided the pretentions of the Japanese
> bonzes and ascetics, as I had those of Christian priests and European
> Spiritualists. I could not believe in the acquisition of powers unknown
> to, and never studied by, men of science; hence I scoffed at all such
> ideas. The superstitious and atrabilious Buddhist, teaching us to shun
> the pleasures of life, to put to rout one’s passions, to render oneself
> insensible alike to happiness and suffering, in order to acquire such
> chimerical powers—seemed supremely ridiculous in my eyes.
> 
> On a day for ever memorable to me—a fatal day—I made the acquaintance
> of a venerable and learned Bonze, a Japanese priest, named Tamoora
> Hideyeri. I met him at the foot of the golden Kwon-On, and from that
> moment he became my best and most trusted friend. Notwithstanding my
> great and genuine regard for him, however, whenever a good opportunity
> was offered I never failed to mock his religious convictions, thereby
> very often hurting his feelings.
> 
> But my old friend was as meek and forgiving as any true Buddhist’s
> heart might desire. He never resented my impatient sarcasms, even when
> they were, to say the least, of equivocal propriety, and generally
> limited his replies to the “wait and see” kind of protest. Nor could he
> be brought to seriously believe in the sincerity of my denial of the
> existence of any God or Gods. The full meaning of the terms “atheism”
> and “scepticism” was beyond the comprehension of his otherwise
> extremely intellectual and acute mind. Like certain reverential
> Christians, he seemed incapable of realizing that any man of sense
> should prefer the wise conclusions arrived at by philosophy and modern
> science to a ridiculous belief in an invisible world full of Gods and
> spirits, dzins and demons. “Man is a spiritual being,” he insisted,
> “who returns to earth more than once, and is rewarded or punished in
> the between times.” The proposition that man is nothing else but a heap
> of organized dust, was beyond him. Like Jeremy Collier, he refused to
> admit that he was no better than “a stalking machine, a speaking head
> without a soul in it,” whose “thoughts are all bound by the laws of
> motion.” “For,” he argued, “if my actions were, as you say, prescribed
> beforehand, and I had no more liberty or free will to change the course
> of my action than the running waters of the river yonder, then the
> glorious doctrine of Karma, of merit and demerit, would be foolishness
> indeed.”
> 
> Thus the whole of my hyper-metaphysical friend’s ontology rested on
> the shaky superstructure of metempsychosis, of a fancied “just” Law of
> Retribution, and other such equally absurd dreams.
> 
> “We cannot,” said he paradoxically one day, “hope to live hereafter in
> the full enjoyment of our consciousness, unless we have built for it
> beforehand a firm and solid foundation of spirituality.... Nay, laugh
> not, friend of no faith,” he meekly pleaded, “but rather think and
> reflect on this. One who has never taught himself to live in Spirit
> during his conscious and responsible life on earth, can hardly hope to
> enjoy a sentient existence after death, when, deprived of his body, he
> is limited to that Spirit alone.”
> 
> “What can you mean by life in Spirit?”—I inquired.
> 
> “Life on a spiritual plane; that which the Buddhists call _Tushita
> Devaloka_ (Paradise). Man can create such a blissful existence for
> himself between two births, by the gradual transference on to that
> plane of all the faculties which during his sojourn on earth manifest
> through his organic body and, as you call it, animal brain.”...
> 
> “How absurd! And how can man do this?”
> 
> “Contemplation and a strong desire to assimilate the blessed Gods, will
> enable him to do so.”
> 
> “And if man refuses this intellectual occupation, by which you mean, I
> suppose, the fixing of the eyes on the tip of his nose, what becomes of
> him after the death of his body?” was my mocking question.
> 
> “He will be dealt with according to the prevailing state of his
> consciousness, of which there are many grades. At best—immediate
> rebirth; at worst—the state of _avitchi_, a mental hell. Yet one need
> not be an ascetic to assimilate spiritual life which will extend to
> the hereafter. All that is required is to try to approach Spirit.”
> 
> “How so? Even when disbelieving in it?”—I rejoined.
> 
> “Even so! One may disbelieve and yet harbor in one’s nature room for
> doubt, however small that room may be, and thus try one day, were it
> but for one moment, to open the door of the inner temple; and this will
> prove sufficient for the purpose.”
> 
> “You are decidedly poetical, and paradoxical to boot, reverend sir.
> Will you kindly explain to me a little more of the mystery?”
> 
> “There is none; still I am willing. Suppose for a moment that some
> unknown temple to which you have never been before, and the existence
> of which you think you have reasons to deny, is the ‘spiritual plane’
> of which I am speaking. Some one takes you by the hand and leads you
> towards its entrance, curiosity makes you open its door and look
> within. By this simple act, by entering it for one second, you have
> established an everlasting connexion between your consciousness and the
> temple. You cannot deny its existence any longer, nor obliterate the
> fact of your having entered it. And according to the character and the
> variety of your work, within its holy precincts, so will you live in it
> after your consciousness is severed from its dwelling of flesh.”
> 
> “What do you mean? And what has my after-death consciousness—if such a
> thing exists—to do with the temple?”
> 
> “It has everything to do with it,” solemnly rejoined the old man.
> “There can be no self-consciousness after death outside the temple
> of spirit. That which you will have done within its plane will alone
> survive. All the rest is false and an illusion. It is doomed to perish
> in the Ocean of Mâyâ.”
> 
> Amused at the idea of living outside one’s body, I urged on my old
> friend to tell me more. Mistaking my meaning, the venerable man
> willingly consented.
> 
> Tamoora Hideyeri belonged to the great temple of Tzi-Onene, a Buddhist
> monastery, famous not only in all Japan, but also throughout Tibet
> and China. No other is so venerated in Kioto. Its monks belong to the
> sect of Dzeno-doo, and are considered as the most learned among the
> many erudite fraternities. They are, moreover, closely connected and
> allied with the Yamabooshi (the ascetics, or hermits), who follow the
> doctrines of Lao-tze. No wonder, that at the slightest provocation on
> my part the priest flew into the highest metaphysics, hoping thereby to
> cure me of my infidelity.
> 
> No use repeating here the long rigmarole of the most hopelessly
> involved and incomprehensible of all doctrines. According to his
> ideas, we have to train ourselves for spirituality in another world—as
> for gymnastics. Carrying on the analogy between the temple and the
> “spiritual plane” he tried to illustrate his idea. He had himself
> worked in the temple of Spirit two-thirds of his life, and given
> several hours daily to “contemplation.” Thus _he knew_ (?!) that after
> he had laid aside his mortal casket, “a mere illusion,” he explained—he
> would in his spiritual consciousness live over again every feeling
> of ennobling joy and divine bliss he had ever had, or _ought to have
> had_—only a hundred-fold intensified. His work on the spirit-plane had
> been considerable, he said, and he hoped, therefore, that the wages of
> the laborer would prove proportionate.
> 
> “But suppose the laborer, as in the example you have just brought
> forward in my case, should have no more than opened the temple door out
> of mere curiosity; had only peeped into the sanctuary never to set his
> foot therein again. What then?”
> 
> “Then,” he answered, “you would have only this short minute to record
> in your future self-consciousness and no more. Our life hereafter
> records and repeats but the impressions and feelings we have had in our
> spiritual experiences and nothing else. Thus, if instead of reverence
> at the moment of entering the abode of Spirit, you had been harboring
> in your heart anger, jealousy or grief, then your future spiritual life
> would be a sad one, in truth. There would be nothing to record, save
> the opening of a door in a fit of bad temper.”
> 
> “How then could it be repeated?”—I insisted, highly amused. “What do
> you suppose I would be doing before incarnating again?”
> 
> “In that case,” he said, speaking slowly and weighing every word—“in
> that case, _you would have, I fear, only to open and shut the temple
> door, over and over again, during a period which, however short, would
> seem to you an eternity_.”
> 
> This kind of after-death occupation appeared to me, at that time, so
> grotesque in its sublime absurdity, that I was seized with an almost
> inextinguishable fit of laughter.
> 
> My venerable friend looked considerably dismayed at such a result
> of his metaphysical instruction. He had evidently not expected such
> hilarity. However, he said nothing, but only sighed and gazed at me
> with increased benevolence and pity shining in his small black eyes.
> 
> “Pray excuse my laughter,” I apologized. “But really, now, you cannot
> seriously mean to tell me that the ‘spiritual state’ you advocate and
> so firmly believe in, consists only in aping certain things we do in
> life?”
> 
> “Nay, nay; not aping, but only intensifying their repetition; filling
> the gaps that were unjustly left unfilled during life in the fruition
> of our acts and deeds, and of everything performed on the spiritual
> plane of the one real state. What I said was an illustration, and
> no doubt for you, who seem entirely ignorant of the mysteries of
> _Soul-Vision_, not a very intelligible one. It is myself who am to be
> blamed.... What I sought to impress upon you was that, as the spiritual
> state of our consciousness liberated from its body is but the fruition
> of every spiritual act performed during life, where an act had been
> barren, there could be no results expected—save the repetition of that
> act itself. This is all. I pray you may be spared such fruitless deeds
> and finally made to see certain truths.” And passing through the usual
> Japanese courtesies of taking leave, the excellent man departed.
> 
> Alas, alas! had I but known at the time what I have learned since, how
> little would I have laughed, and how much more would I have learned!
> 
> But as the matter stood, the more personal affection and respect I felt
> for him, the less could I become reconciled to his wild ideas about
> an after-life, and especially as to the acquisition by some men of
> supernatural powers. I felt particularly disgusted with his reverence
> for the Yamabooshi, the allies of every Buddhist sect in the land.
> Their claims to the “miraculous” were simply odious to my notions. To
> hear every Jap I knew at Kioto, even to my own partner, the shrewdest
> of all the business men I had come across in the East—mentioning these
> followers of Lao-tze with downcast eyes, reverentially folded hands,
> and affirmations of their possessing “great” and “wonderful” gifts,
> was more than I was prepared to patiently tolerate in those days. And
> who were they, after all, these great magicians with their ridiculous
> pretensions to super-mundane knowledge; these “holy beggars” who, as I
> then thought, purposely dwell in the recesses of unfrequented mountains
> and on unapproachable craggy steeps, so as the better to afford no
> chance to curious intruders of finding them out and watching them in
> their own dens? Simply impudent fortune-tellers, Japanese gypsies
> who sell charms and talismans, and no better. In answer to those who
> sought to assure me that though the Yamabooshi lead a mysterious life,
> admitting none of the profane to their secrets, they still do accept
> pupils, however difficult it is for one to become their disciple, and
> that thus they have living witnesses to the great purity and sanctity
> of their lives, in answer to such affirmations I opposed the strongest
> negation and stood firmly by it. I insulted both masters and pupils,
> classing them under the same category of fools, when not knaves, and
> I went so far as to include in this number the Sintos. Now Sintoism
> or _Sin-Syu_, “faith in the Gods, and in the way to the Gods,” that
> is, belief in the communication between these creatures and men, is
> a kind of worship of nature-spirits, than which nothing can be more
> miserably absurd. And by placing the Sintos among the fools and knaves
> of other sects, I gained many enemies. For the Sinto Kanusi (spiritual
> teachers) are looked upon as the highest in the upper classes of
> Society, the Mikado himself being at the head of their hierarchy and
> the members of the sect belonging to the most cultured and educated men
> in Japan. These Kanusi of the Sinto form no caste or class apart, nor
> do they pass any ordination—at any rate none known to outsiders. And as
> they claim publicly no special privilege or powers, even their dress
> being in no wise different from that of the laity, but are simply in
> the world’s opinion professors and students of occult and spiritual
> sciences, I very often came in contact with them without in the least
> suspecting that I was in the presence of such personages.
> 
> II
> 
> THE MYSTERIOUS VISITOR
> 
> Years passed; and as time went by, my ineradicable scepticism grew
> stronger and waxed fiercer every day. I have already mentioned an elder
> and much-beloved sister, my only surviving relative. She had married
> and had lately gone to live at Nuremberg. I regarded her with feelings
> more filial than fraternal, and her children were as dear to me as
> might have been my own. At the time of the great catastrophe that in
> the course of a few days had made my father lose his large fortune, and
> my mother break her heart, she it was, that sweet big sister of mine,
> who had made herself of her own accord the guardian angel of our ruined
> family. Out of her great love for me, her younger brother, for whom she
> attempted to replace the professors that could no longer be afforded,
> she had renounced her own happiness. She sacrificed herself and the man
> she loved, by indefinitely postponing their marriage, in order to help
> our father and chiefly myself by her undivided devotion. And, oh, how I
> loved and reverenced her, time but strengthening this earliest family
> affection! They who maintain that no atheist, as such, can be a true
> friend, an affectionate relative, or a loyal subject, utter—whether
> consciously or unconsciously—the greatest calumny and lie. To say that
> a materialist grows hard-hearted as he grows older, that he cannot love
> as a believer does, is simply the greatest fallacy.
> 
> There may be such exceptional cases it is true, but these are found
> only occasionally in men who are even more selfish than they are
> sceptical, or vulgarly worldly. But when a man who is kindly disposed
> in his nature, for no selfish motives but because of reason and love
> of truth, becomes what is called atheistical, he is only strengthened
> in his family affections, and in his sympathies with his fellow men.
> All his emotions, all the ardent aspirations towards the unseen and
> unreachable, all the love which he would otherwise have uselessly
> bestowed on a suppositional heaven and its God, become now centered
> with tenfold force upon his loved ones and mankind. Indeed, the
> atheist’s heart alone—
> 
>                           ... can know,
>     What secret tides of still enjoyment flow
>     When brothers love....
> 
> It was such holy fraternal love that led me also to sacrifice my
> comfort and personal welfare to secure her happiness, the felicity
> of her who had been more than a mother to me. I was a mere youth
> when I left home for Hamburg. There, working with all the desperate
> earnestness of a man who has but one noble object in view—to relieve
> suffering, and help those whom he loves—I very soon secured the
> confidence of my employers, who raised me in consequence to the high
> post of trust I always enjoyed. My first real pleasure and reward in
> life was to see my sister married to the man she had sacrificed for my
> sake, and to help them in their struggle for existence. So purifying
> and unselfish was this affection of mine for her that when it came
> to be shared among her children, instead of losing in intensity by
> such division, it seemed only to grow the stronger. Born with the
> potentiality of the warmest family affection in me, the devotion for my
> sister was so great, that the thought of burning that sacred fire of
> love before any idol, save that of herself and family, never entered my
> head. This was the only church I recognized, the only church wherein I
> worshipped at the altar of holy family affection. In fact this large
> family of eleven persons, including her husband, was the only tie
> that attached me to Europe. Twice during a period of nine years, had
> I crossed the ocean with the sole object of seeing and pressing these
> dear ones to my heart. I had no other business in the West; and having
> performed this pleasant duty, I returned each time to Japan to work and
> toil for them. For their sake I remained a bachelor, that the wealth I
> might acquire should go undivided to them alone.
> 
> We had always corresponded as regularly as the long transit of the then
> very irregular service of the mail-boats would permit. But suddenly
> there came a break in my letters from home. For nearly a year I
> received no intelligence; and day by day, I became more restless, more
> apprehensive of some great misfortune. Vainly I looked for a letter, a
> simple message; and my efforts to account for so unusual a silence were
> fruitless.
> 
> “Friend,” said to me one day Tamoora Hideyeri, my only confidant,
> “Friend, consult a holy Yamabooshi and you will feel at rest.”
> 
> Of course the offer was rejected with as much moderation as I could
> command under the provocation. But, as steamer after steamer came in
> without a word of news, I felt a despair which daily increased in depth
> and fixity. This finally degenerated into an irrepressible craving, a
> morbid desire to learn—the worst as I then thought. I struggled hard
> with the feeling, but it had the best of me. Only a few months before
> a complete master of myself—I now became an abject slave to fear. A
> fatalist of the school of D’Holbach, I, who had always regarded belief
> in the system of necessity as being the only promoter of philosophical
> happiness, and as having the most advantageous influence over human
> weaknesses, _I_ felt a craving for something akin to fortune-telling!
> I had gone so far as to forget the first principle of my doctrine—the
> only one calculated to calm our sorrows, to inspire us with a useful
> submission, namely a rational resignation to the decrees of blind
> destiny, with which foolish sensibility causes us so often to be
> overwhelmed—the doctrine that _all is necessary_. Yes; forgetting
> this, I was drawn into a shameful, superstitious longing, a stupid,
> disgraceful desire to learn—if not futurity, at any rate that which was
> taking place at the other side of the globe. My conduct seemed utterly
> modified, my temperament and aspirations wholly changed; and like a
> weak, nervous girl, I caught myself straining my mind to the very verge
> of lunacy in an attempt to look—as I had been told one could sometimes
> do—beyond the oceans, and learn, at last, the real cause of this long,
> inexplicable silence!
> 
> One evening, at sunset, my old friend, the venerable Bonze, Tamoora,
> appeared on the verandah of my low wooden house. I had not visited
> him for many days, and he had come to know how I was. I took the
> opportunity to once more sneer at one, whom, in reality, I regarded
> with most affectionate respect. With equivocal taste—for which I
> repented almost before the words had been pronounced—I inquired of
> him why he had taken the trouble to walk all that distance when he
> might have learned anything he liked about me by simply interrogating
> a Yamabooshi? He seemed a little hurt, at first; but after keenly
> scrutinizing my dejected face, he mildly remarked that he could only
> insist upon what he had advised before. Only one of that holy order
> could give me consolation in my present state.
> 
> From that instant, an insane desire possessed me to challenge him to
> prove his assertions. I defied—I said to him—any and every one of his
> alleged magicians to tell me the name of the person I was thinking
> of, and what he was doing at that moment. He quietly answered that my
> desire could be easily satisfied. There was a Yamabooshi two doors from
> me, visiting a sick Sinto. He would fetch him—if I only said the word.
> 
> I said it and _from the moment of its utterance my doom was sealed_.
> 
> How shall I find words to describe the scene that followed! Twenty
> minutes after the desire had been so incautiously expressed, an old
> Japanese, uncommonly tall and majestic for one of that race, pale,
> thin and emaciated, was standing before me. There, where I had
> expected to find servile obsequiousness, I only discerned an air of
> calm and dignified composure, the attitude of one who knows his moral
> superiority, and therefore scorns to notice the mistakes of those who
> fail to recognize it. To the somewhat irreverent and mocking questions,
> which I put to him one after another, with feverish eagerness, he made
> no reply; but gazed on me in silence as a physician would look at a
> delirious patient. From the moment he fixed his eye on mine, I felt—or
> shall I say, saw—as though it were a sharp ray of light, a thin silvery
> thread, shoot out from the intensely black and narrow eyes so deeply
> sunk in the yellow old face. It seemed to penetrate into my brain
> and heart like an arrow, and set to work to dig out therefrom every
> thought and feeling. Yes; I both saw and felt it, and very soon the
> double sensation became intolerable.
> 
> To break the spell I defied him to tell me what he had found in my
> thoughts. Calmly came the correct answer—Extreme anxiety for a female
> relative, her husband and children, who were inhabiting a house the
> correct description of which he gave as though he knew it as well
> as myself. I turned a suspicious eye upon my friend, the Bonze, to
> whose indiscretions, I thought, I was indebted for the quick reply.
> Remembering however that Tamoora could know nothing of the appearance
> of my sister’s house, that the Japanese are proverbially truthful and,
> as friends, faithful to death—I felt ashamed of my suspicion. To atone
> for it before my own conscience I asked the hermit whether he could
> tell me anything of the present state of that beloved sister of mine.
> The foreigner—was the reply—would never believe in the words, or trust
> to the knowledge of any person but himself. Were the Yamabooshi to tell
> him, the impression would wear out hardly a few hours later, and the
> inquirer find himself as miserable as before. There was but one means;
> and that was to make the foreigner (myself) see with his own eyes, and
> thus learn the truth for himself. Was the inquirer ready to be placed
> by a Yamabooshi, a stranger to him, in the required state?
> 
> I had heard in Europe of mesmerized somnambules and pretenders to
> clairvoyance, and having no faith in them, I had, therefore, nothing
> against the process itself. Even in the midst of my never-ceasing
> mental agony, I could not help smiling at the ridiculous nature of the
> operation I was willingly submitting to. Nevertheless I silently bowed
> consent.
> 
> III
> 
> PSYCHIC MAGIC
> 
> The old Yamabooshi lost no time. He looked at the setting sun, and
> finding probably, the Lord Ten-Dzio-Dai-Dzio (the Spirit who darts
> his Rays) propitious for the coming ceremony, he speedily drew out a
> little bundle. It contained a small lacquered box, a piece of vegetable
> paper, made from the bark of the mulberry tree, and a pen, with which
> he traced upon the paper a few sentences in the _Naiden_ character—a
> peculiar style of written language used only for religious and mystical
> purposes. Having finished, he exhibited from under his clothes a small
> round mirror of steel of extraordinary brilliancy, and placing it
> before my eyes, asked me to look into it.
> 
> I had not only heard before of these mirrors, which are frequently used
> in the temples, but I had often seen them. It is claimed that under
> the direction and will of instructed priests, there appear in them the
> Daij-Dzin, the great spirits who notify the inquiring devotees of their
> fate. I first imagined that his intention was to evoke such a spirit,
> who would answer my queries. What happened, however, was something of
> quite a different character.
> 
> No sooner had I, not without a last pang of mental squeamishness,
> produced by a deep sense of my own absurd position, touched the
> mirror, than I suddenly felt a strange sensation in the arm of the
> hand that held it. For a brief moment I forgot to “sit in the seat of
> the scorner” and failed to look at the matter from a ludicrous point
> of view. Was it fear that suddenly clutched my brain, for an instant
> paralyzing its activity—
> 
>                                            ... that fear
>     When the heart longs to know, what it is death to hear?
> 
> No; for I still had consciousness enough left to go on persuading
> myself that nothing would come out of an experiment, in the nature
> of which no sane man could ever believe. What was it then, that
> crept across my brain like a living thing of ice, producing therein
> a sensation of horror, and then clutched at my heart as if a deadly
> serpent had fastened its fangs into it? With a convulsive jerk of the
> hand I dropped the—I blush to write the adjective—“magic” mirror, and
> could not force myself to pick it up from the settee on which I was
> reclining. For one short moment there was a terrible struggle between
> some undefined, and to me utterly inexplicable, longing to look into
> the depths of the polished surface of the mirror and my pride, the
> ferocity of which nothing seemed capable of taming. It was finally
> so tamed, however, its revolt being conquered by its own defiant
> intensity. There was an opened novel lying on a lacquer table near the
> settee, and as my eyes happened to fall upon its pages, I read the
> words, “The veil which covers futurity is woven by the hand of mercy.”
> This was enough. That same pride which had hitherto held me back from
> what I regarded as a degrading, superstitious experiment, caused me to
> challenge my fate. I picked up the ominously shining disk and prepared
> to look into it.
> 
> While I was examining the mirror, the Yamabooshi hastily spoke a few
> words to the Bonze, Tamoora, at which I threw a furtive and suspicious
> glance at both. I was wrong once more.
> 
> “The holy man desires me to put you a question and give you at the
> same time a warning,” remarked the Bonze. “If you are willing to see
> for yourself now, you will have—under the penalty of _seeing for ever,
> in the hereafter, all that is taking place, at whatever distance, and
> that against your will or inclination_—to submit to a regular course of
> purification, after you have learned what you want through the mirror.”
> 
> “What is this course, and what have I to promise?” I asked defiantly.
> 
> “It is for your own good. You must promise him to submit to the
> process, lest, for the rest of his life, he should have to hold
> himself responsible, before his own conscience, for having made an
> _irresponsible_ seer of you. Will you do so, friend?”
> 
> “There will be time enough to think of it, if I see anything”—I
> sneeringly replied, adding under my breath—“something I doubt a good
> deal, so far.”
> 
> “Well, you are warned, friend. The consequences will now remain with
> yourself,” was the solemn answer.
> 
> I glanced at the clock, and made a gesture of impatience, which was
> remarked and understood by the Yamabooshi. It was just _seven minutes
> after five_.
> 
> “Define well in your mind _what_ you would see and learn,” said the
> “conjuror,” placing the mirror and paper in my hands, and instructing
> me how to use them.
> 
> His instructions were received by me with more impatience than
> gratitude; and for one short instant, I hesitated again. Nevertheless I
> replied, while fixing the mirror:
> 
> “_I desire but one thing—to learn the reason or reasons why my sister
> has so suddenly ceased writing to me._”...
> 
> Had I pronounced these words in reality, and in the hearing of the two
> witnesses, or had I only thought them? To this day I cannot decide the
> point. I now remember but one thing distinctly: while I sat gazing in
> the mirror, the Yamabooshi kept gazing at me. But whether this process
> lasted half a second or three hours, I have never since been able to
> settle in my mind with any degree of satisfaction. I can recall every
> detail of the scene up to the moment when I took up the mirror with
> the left hand, holding the paper inscribed with the mystic characters
> between the thumb and finger of the right, when all of a sudden I
> seemed to quite lose consciousness of the surrounding objects. The
> passage from the active waking state to one that I could compare with
> nothing I had ever experienced before, was so rapid, that while my eyes
> had ceased to perceive external objects and had completely lost sight
> of the Bonze, the Yamabooshi, and even of my room, I could nevertheless
> distinctly see the whole of my head and my back, as I sat leaning
> forward with the mirror in my hand. Then came a strong sensation of
> an involuntary rush forward, of _snapping_ off, so to say, from my
> place—I had almost said from my body. And, then, while every one of
> my other senses had become totally paralysed, my eyes, as I thought,
> unexpectedly caught a clearer and far more vivid glimpse than they had
> ever had in reality, of my sister’s new house at Nuremberg, which I had
> never visited and knew only from a sketch, and other scenery with which
> I had never been very familiar. Together with this, and while feeling
> in my brain what seemed like flashes of a departing consciousness—dying
> persons must feel so, no doubt—the very last, vague thought, so weak
> as to have been hardly perceptible, was that I must look very, _very_
> ridiculous.... This _feeling_—for such it was rather than a thought—was
> interrupted, suddenly extinguished, so to say, by a clear _mental
> vision_ (I cannot characterize it otherwise) of myself, of that which
> I regarded as, and knew to be my body, lying with ashy cheeks on the
> settee, dead to all intents and purposes, but still staring with the
> cold and glassy eyes of a corpse into the mirror. Bending over it, with
> his two emaciated hands cutting the air in every direction over _its_
> white face, stood the tall figure of the Yamabooshi, for whom I felt
> at that instant an inextinguishable, murderous hatred. As I was going,
> in thought, to pounce upon the vile charlatan, my corpse, the two old
> men, the room itself, and every object in it, trembled and danced in a
> reddish glowing light, and seemed to float rapidly away from “me.” A
> few more grotesque, distorted shadows before “my” sight; and, with a
> last feeling of terror and a supreme effort to realise _who then was I
> now, since I was not that corpse_—a great veil of darkness fell over
> me, like a funeral pall, and every thought in me was dead.
> 
> IV
> 
> A VISION OF HORROR
> 
> How strange!... Where was I now? It was evident to me that I had once
> more returned to my senses. For there I was, vividly realizing that
> I was rapidly moving forward, while experiencing a queer, strange
> sensation as though I were swimming, without impulse or effort on my
> part, and in total darkness. The idea that first presented itself to
> me was that of a long subterranean passage of water, of earth, and
> stifling air, though bodily I had no perception, no sensation, of the
> presence or contact of any of these. I tried to utter a few words, to
> repeat my last sentence, “I desire but one thing: to learn the reason
> or reasons why my sister has so suddenly ceased writing to me”—but the
> only words I heard out of the twenty-one, were the two, “_to learn_,”
> and these, instead of their coming out of my own larynx, came back to
> me in my own voice, but entirely outside myself, near, but not in me.
> In short, they were pronounced by my voice, not by my lips....
> 
> One more rapid, involuntary motion, one more plunge into the
> Cimmerian darkness of a (to me) unknown element, and I saw myself
> standing—actually standing—underground, as it seemed. I was compactly
> and thickly surrounded on all sides, above and below, right and left,
> with earth, and _in_ the mould, and yet it weighed not, and seemed
> quite immaterial and transparent to _my senses_. I did not realize
> for one second the utter absurdity, nay, impossibility of that
> _seeming_ fact! One second more, one short instant, and I perceived—oh,
> inexpressible horror, when I think of it now; for then, although I
> perceived, realized, and recorded facts and events far more clearly
> than ever I had done before, I did not seem to be touched in any other
> way by what I saw. Yes—I perceived a coffin at my feet. It was a plain
> unpretentious shell, made of deal, the last couch of the pauper,
> in which, notwithstanding its closed lid, I plainly saw a hideous,
> grinning skull, a man’s skeleton, mutilated and broken in many of its
> parts, as though it had been taken out of some hidden chamber of the
> defunct Inquisition, where it had been subjected to torture. “Who can
> it be?”—I thought.
> 
> At this moment I heard again proceeding from afar the same voice—_my_
> voice ... “_the reason or reasons why_” ... it said; as though these
> words were the unbroken continuation of the same sentence of which
> it had just repeated the two words “to learn.” It sounded near, and
> yet as from some incalculable distance; giving me then the idea that
> the long subterranean journey, the subsequent mental reflexions and
> discoveries, had occupied no time; had been performed during the short,
> almost instantaneous interval between the first and the middle words of
> the sentence, begun, at any rate, if not actually pronounced by myself
> in my room at Kioto, and which it was now finishing, in interrupted,
> broken phrases, like a faithful echo of my own words and voice....
> 
> Forthwith, the hideous, mangled remains began assuming a form, and
> to me, but too familiar appearance. The broken parts joined together
> one to the other, the bones became covered once more with flesh, and
> I recognized in these disfigured remains—with some surprise, but not
> a trace of feeling at the sight—my sister’s dead husband, my own
> brother-in-law, whom I had for her sake loved so truly. “How was it,
> and how did he come to die such a terrible death?”—I asked myself. To
> put oneself a query seemed, in the state in which I was, to instantly
> solve it. Hardly had I asked myself the question, when, as if in a
> panorama, I saw the retrospective picture of poor Karl’s death, in all
> its horrid vividness, and with every thrilling detail, every one of
> which, however, left me then entirely and brutally indifferent. Here
> he is, the dear old fellow, full of life and joy at the prospect of
> more lucrative employment from his principal, examining and trying in a
> wood-sawing factory a monster steam engine just arrived from America.
> He bends over, to examine more closely an inner arrangement, to tighten
> a screw. His clothes are caught by the teeth of the revolving wheel
> in full motion, and suddenly he is dragged down, doubled up, and his
> limbs half severed, torn off, before the workmen, unacquainted with the
> mechanism can stop it. He is taken out, or what remains of him, dead,
> mangled, a thing of horror, an unrecognizable mass of palpitating flesh
> and blood! I follow the remains, wheeled as an unrecognizable heap to
> the hospital, hear the brutally given order that the messengers of
> death should stop on their way at the house of the widow and orphans.
> I follow them, and find the unconscious family quietly assembled
> together. I see my sister, the dear and beloved, and remain indifferent
> at the sight, only feeling highly interested in the coming scene. My
> heart, my feelings, even my personality, seemed to have disappeared, to
> have been left behind, to belong to somebody else.
> 
> There “I” stand, and witness her unprepared reception of the ghastly
> news. I realize clearly, without one moment’s hesitation or mistake,
> the effect of the shock upon her, I perceive clearly, following and
> recording, to the minutest detail, her sensations and the inner process
> that takes place in her. I watch and remember, missing not one single
> point.
> 
> As the corpse is brought into the house for identification I hear
> the long agonizing cry, my own name pronounced, and the dull thud of
> the living body falling upon the remains of the dead one. I follow
> with curiosity the sudden thrill and the instantaneous perturbation
> in her brain that follow it, and watch with attention the worm-like,
> precipitate, and immensely intensified motion of the tubular fibers,
> the instantaneous change of color in the cephalic extremity of the
> nervous system, the fibrous nervous matter passing from white to bright
> red and then to a dark red, bluish hue. I notice the sudden flash of
> a phosphorous-like, brilliant Radiance, its tremor and its sudden
> extinction followed by darkness—complete darkness in the region of
> memory—as the Radiance, comparable in its form only to a human shape,
> oozes out suddenly from the top of the head, expands, loses its form
> and scatters. And I say to myself: “This is insanity; life-long,
> incurable insanity, for the principle of intelligence is not paralyzed
> or extinguished temporarily, but has just deserted the tabernacle for
> ever, ejected from it by the terrible force of the sudden blow.... The
> link between the animal and the divine essence is broken.”... And as
> the unfamiliar term “divine” is mentally uttered _my_ “THOUGHT”—laughs.
> 
> Suddenly I hear again my far-off yet near voice pronouncing
> emphatically and close by me the words ... “_why my sister has so
> suddenly ceased writing_.”... And before the two final words “_to
> me_” have completed the sentence, I see a long series of sad events,
> immediately following the catastrophe.
> 
> I behold the mother, now a helpless, grovelling idiot, in the lunatic
> asylum attached to the city hospital, the seven younger children
> admitted into a refuge for paupers. Finally I see the two elder, a boy
> of fifteen, and a girl a year younger, my favorites, both taken by
> strangers into their service. A captain of a sailing vessel carries
> away my nephew, an old Jewess adopts the tender girl. I see the events
> with all their horrors and thrilling details, and record each, to the
> smallest detail, with the utmost coolness.
> 
> For, mark well: when I use such expressions as “horrors,” etc., they
> are to be understood as an after-thought. During the whole time of the
> events described I experienced no sensation of either pain or pity. My
> feelings seemed to be paralyzed as well as my external senses; it was
> only after “coming back” that I realized my irretrievable losses to
> their full extent.
> 
> Much of that which I had so vehemently denied in those days, owing to
> sad personal experience I have to admit now. Had I been told by anyone
> at that time, that man could act and think and feel, irrespective of
> his brain and senses; nay, that by some mysterious, and to this day,
> for me, incomprehensible power, _he_ could be transported _mentally_,
> thousands of miles away from his body, there to witness not only
> present but also past events, and remember these by storing them in
> his memory—I would have proclaimed that man a madman. Alas, I can do
> so no longer, for I have become myself that “madman.” Ten, twenty,
> forty, a hundred times during the course of this wretched life of mine,
> have I experienced and lived over such moments of existence, _outside
> of my body_. Accursed be that hour when this terrible power was first
> awakened in me! I have not even the consolation left of attributing
> such glimpses of events at a distance to insanity. Madmen rave and see
> that which exists not in the realm they belong to. My visions have
> proved _invariably correct_. But to my narrative of woe.
> 
> I had hardly had time to see my unfortunate young niece in her new
> Israelitish home, when I felt a shock of the same nature as the one
> that had sent me “swimming” through the bowels of the earth, as I had
> thought. I opened my eyes in my own room, and the first thing I fixed
> upon by accident, was the clock. The hands of the dial showed seven
> minutes and a half past five!... I had thus passed through these most
> terrible experiences, which it takes me hours to narrate, _in precisely
> half a minute of time_!
> 
> But this, too, was an after-thought. For one brief instant I
> recollected nothing of what I had seen. The interval between the time I
> had glanced at the clock when taking the mirror from the Yamabooshi’s
> hand and this second glance, seemed to me merged in one. I was just
> opening my lips to hurry on the Yamabooshi with his experiment, when
> the full remembrance of what I had just seen flashed lightning-like
> into my brain. Uttering a cry of horror and despair, I felt as though
> the whole creation were crushing me under its weight. For one moment I
> remained speechless, the picture of human ruin amid a world of death
> and desolation. My heart sank down in anguish: my doom was closed; and
> a hopeless gloom seemed to settle over the rest of my life for ever.
> 
> V
> 
> RETURN OF DOUBTS
> 
> Then came a reaction as sudden as my grief itself. A doubt arose in my
> mind, which forthwith grew into a fierce desire of denying the truth of
> what I had seen. A stubborn resolution of treating the whole thing as
> an empty, meaningless dream, the effect of my overstrained mind, took
> possession of me. Yes; it was but a lying vision, an idiotic cheating
> of my own senses, suggesting pictures of death and misery which had
> been evoked by weeks of incertitude and mental depression.
> 
> “How could I see all that I have seen in less than half a minute?”—I
> exclaimed. “The theory of dreams, the rapidity with which the material
> changes on which our ideas in vision depend, are excited in the
> hemispherical ganglia, is sufficient to account for the long series of
> events I have seemed to experience. In dream alone can the relations
> of space and time be so completely annihilated. The Yamabooshi is for
> nothing in this disagreeable nightmare. He is only reaping that which
> has been sown by myself, and, by using some infernal drug, of which his
> tribe have the secret, he has contrived to make me lose consciousness
> for a few seconds and see that vision—as lying as it is horrid. Avaunt
> all such thoughts, I believe them not. In a few days there will be a
> steamer sailing for Europe.... I shall leave to-morrow!”
> 
> This disjointed monologue was pronounced by me aloud, regardless of the
> presence of my respected friend the Bonze, Tamoora, and the Yamabooshi.
> The latter was standing before me in the same position as when he
> placed the mirror in my hands, and kept looking at me calmly, I should
> perhaps say looking _through_ me, and in dignified silence. The Bonze,
> whose kind countenance was beaming with sympathy, approached me as he
> would a sick child, and gently laying his hand on mine, and with tears
> in his eyes, said: “Friend, you must not leave this city before you
> have been completely purified of your contact with the lower Daij-Dzins
> (spirits), who had to be used to guide your inexperienced soul to the
> places it craved to see. The entrance to your Inner Self must be closed
> against their dangerous intrusion. Lose no time, therefore, my son, and
> allow the holy Master yonder, to purify you at once.”
> 
> But nothing can be more deaf than anger once aroused. “The sap of
> reason” could no longer “quench the fire of passion,” and at that
> moment I was not fit to listen to his friendly voice. His is a face
> I can never recall to my memory without genuine feeling; his, a name
> I will ever pronounce with a sigh of emotion; but at that ever
> memorable hour when my passions were inflamed to white heat, I felt
> almost a hatred for the kind, good old man, I could not forgive him his
> interference in the present event. Hence, for all answer, therefore, he
> received from me a stern rebuke, a violent protest on my part against
> the idea that I could ever regard the vision I had had, in any other
> light save that of an empty dream, and his Yamabooshi as anything
> better than an impostor. “I will leave to-morrow, had I to forfeit my
> whole fortune as a penalty”—I exclaimed, pale with rage and despair.
> 
> “You will repent it the whole of your life, if you do so before the
> holy man has shut every entrance in you against intruders ever on
> the watch and ready to enter the open door,” was the answer. “The
> Daij-Dzins will have the best of you.”
> 
> I interrupted him with a brutal laugh, and a still more brutally
> phrased inquiry about the _fees_ I was expected to give the Yamabooshi,
> for his experiment with me.
> 
> “He needs no reward,” was the reply. “The order he belongs to is the
> richest in the world, since its adherents need nothing, for they are
> above all terrestrial and venal desires. Insult him not, the good man
> who came to help you out of pure sympathy for your suffering, and to
> relieve you of mental agony.”
> 
> But I would listen to no words of reason and wisdom. The spirit of
> rebellion and pride had taken possession of me, and made me disregard
> every feeling of personal friendship, or even of simple propriety.
> Luckily for me, on turning round to order the mendicant monk out of my
> presence, I found he had gone.
> 
> I had not seen him move, and attributed his stealthy departure to fear
> at having been detected and understood.
> 
> Fool! blind, conceited idiot that I was! Why did I fail to recognize
> the Yamabooshi’s power, and that the peace of my whole life was
> departing with him, from that moment for ever? But I did so fail.
> Even the fell demon of my long fears—uncertainty—was now entirely
> overpowered by that fiend scepticism—the silliest of all. A dull,
> morbid unbelief, a stubborn denial of the evidence of my own senses,
> and a determined will to regard the whole vision as a fancy of my
> overwrought mind, had taken firm hold of me.
> 
> “My mind,” I argued, “what is it? Shall I believe with the
> superstitious and the weak that this production of phosphorus and gray
> matter is indeed the superior part of me; that it can act and see
> independently of my physical senses? Never! As well believe in the
> planetary ‘intelligences’ of the astrologer, as in the ‘Daij-Dzins’ of
> my credulous though well-meaning friend, the priest. As well confess
> one’s belief in Jupiter and Sol, Saturn and Mercury, and that these
> worthies guide their spheres and concern themselves with mortals,
> as to give one serious thought to the airy nonentities supposed to
> have guided my ‘soul’ in its unpleasant dream! I loathe and laugh at
> the absurd idea. I regard it as a personal insult to the intellect
> and rational reasoning powers of a man, to speak of invisible
> creatures, ‘_subjective_ intelligences,’ and all that kind of insane
> superstition.” In short, I begged my friend the Bonze to spare me his
> protests, and thus the unpleasantness of breaking with him for ever.
> 
> Thus I raved and argued before the venerable Japanese gentleman, doing
> all in my power to leave on his mind the indelible conviction of my
> having gone suddenly mad. But his admirable forbearance proved more
> than equal to my idiotic passion; and he implored me once more, for the
> sake of my whole future, to submit to certain “necessary purificatory
> rites.”
> 
> “Never! Far rather dwell in air, rarefied to nothing by the air-pump
> of wholesome unbelief, than in the dim fog of silly superstition,”
> I argued, paraphrazing Richter’s remark. “I will not believe,” I
> repeated; “but as I can no longer bear such uncertainty about my sister
> and her family, I will return by the first steamer to Europe.”
> 
> This final determination upset my old acquaintance altogether. His
> earnest prayer not to depart before I had seen the Yamabooshi once
> more, received no attention from me.
> 
> “Friend of a foreign land!”—he cried, “I pray that you may not repent
> of your unbelief and rashness. May the ‘Holy One’ (Kwan-On, the Goddess
> of Mercy) protect you from the Dzins! For, since you refuse to submit
> to the process of purification at the hands of the holy Yamabooshi,
> he is powerless to defend you from the evil influences evoked by your
> unbelief and defiance of truth. But let me, at this parting hour, I
> beseech you, let me, an older man who wishes you well, warn you once
> more and persuade you of things you are still ignorant of. May I speak?”
> 
> “Go on and have your say,” was the ungracious assent. “But let me warn
> you, in my turn, that nothing you can say can make of me a believer in
> your disgraceful superstitions.” This was added with a cruel feeling of
> pleasure in bestowing one more needless insult.
> 
> But the excellent man disregarded this new sneer as he had all others.
> Never shall I forget the solemn earnestness of his parting words, the
> pitying, remorseful look on his face when he found that it was, indeed,
> all to no purpose, that by his kindly meant interference he had only
> led me to my destruction.
> 
> “Lend me your ear, good sir, for the last time,” he began, “learn that
> unless the holy and venerable man, who, to relieve your distress,
> opened your ‘soul vision,’ is permitted to complete his work, your
> future life will, indeed, be little worth living. He has to safeguard
> you against involuntary repetitions of visions of the same character.
> Unless you consent to it of your own free will, however, you will have
> to be left in the power of _Forces_ which will harass and persecute you
> to the verge of insanity. Know that the development of ‘Long Vision’
> (clairvoyance)—which is accomplished _at will_ only by those for whom
> the Mother of Mercy, the great Kwan-On, has no secrets—must, in the
> case of the beginner, be pursued with help of the air Dzins (elemental
> spirits) whose nature is soulless, and hence wicked. Know also that,
> while the Arihat, ‘the destroyer of the enemy,’ who has subjected and
> made of these creatures his servants, has nothing to fear; he who
> has no power over them becomes their slave. Nay, laugh not in your
> great pride and ignorance, but listen further. During the time of the
> vision and while the inner perceptions are directed towards the events
> they seek, the Daij-Dzin has the seer—when, like yourself, he is an
> inexperienced tyro—entirely in its power; and for the time being _that
> seer is no longer himself_. He partakes of the nature of his ‘guide.’
> The Daij-Dzin, which directs his inner sight, keeps his soul in durance
> vile, making of him, while the state lasts, a creature like itself.
> Bereft of his divine light, man is but a soulless being; hence during
> the time of such connection, he will feel no human emotions, neither
> pity nor fear, love nor mercy.”
> 
> “Hold!” I involuntarily exclaimed, as the words vividly brought
> back to my recollection the indifference with which I had witnessed
> my sister’s despair and sudden loss of reason in my “hallucination.”
> “Hold!... But no; it is still worse madness in me to heed or find any
> sense in your ridiculous tale! But if you knew it to be so dangerous
> why have advised the experiment at all?”—I added mockingly.
> 
> “It had to last but a few seconds, and no evil could have resulted from
> it, had you kept your promise to submit to purification,” was the sad
> and humble reply. “I wished you well, my friend, and my heart was nigh
> breaking to see you suffering day by day. The experiment is harmless
> when directed by _one who knows_, and becomes dangerous only when the
> final precaution is neglected. It is the ‘Master of Visions,’ he who
> has opened an entrance into your soul, who has to close it by using the
> Seal of Purification against any further and deliberate ingress of....”
> 
> “The ‘Master of Visions,’ forsooth!” I cried, brutally interrupting
> him, “say rather the Master of Imposture!”
> 
> The look of sorrow on his kind old face was so intense and painful to
> behold that I perceived I had gone too far; but it was too late.
> 
> “Farewell, then!” said the old bonze, rising; and after performing the
> usual ceremonials of politeness, Tamoora left the house in dignified
> silence.
> 
> VI
> 
> I DEPART—BUT NOT ALONE
> 
> Several days later I sailed, but during my stay I saw my venerable
> friend the Bonze, no more. Evidently on that last, and to me for ever
> memorable evening, he had been seriously offended with my more than
> irreverent, my downright insulting remark about one whom he so justly
> respected. I felt sorry for him, but the wheel of passion and pride
> was too incessantly at work to permit me to feel a single moment of
> remorse. What was it that made me so relish the pleasure of wrath,
> that when, for one instant, I happened to lose sight of my supposed
> grievance toward the Yamabooshi, I forthwith lashed myself back into a
> kind of artificial fury against him. He had only accomplished what he
> had been expected to do, and what he had tacitly promised; not only so,
> but it was I myself who had deprived him of the possibility of doing
> more, even for my own protection, if I might believe the Bonze—a man
> whom I knew to be thoroughly honorable and reliable. Was it regret at
> having been forced by my pride to refuse the proffered precaution, or
> was it the fear of remorse that made me rake together, in my heart,
> during those evil hours, the smallest details of the supposed insult to
> that same suicidal pride? Remorse, as an old poet has aptly remarked,
> “is like the heart in which it grows:...
> 
>                          ... if proud and gloomy,
>     It is a poison-tree, that pierced to the utmost,
>     Weeps only tears of blood.”
> 
> Perchance, it was the indefinite fear of something of that sort which
> caused me to remain so obdurate, and led me to excuse, under the plea
> of terrible provocation, even the unprovoked insults that I had heaped
> upon the head of my kind and all-forgiving friend, the priest. However,
> it was now too late in the day to recall the words of offence I had
> uttered; and all I could do was to promise myself the satisfaction of
> writing him a friendly letter, as soon as I reached home. Fool, blind
> fool, elated with insolent self-conceit, that I was! So sure did I
> feel, that my vision was due merely to some trick of the Yamabooshi,
> that I actually gloated over my coming triumph in writing to the
> Bonze that I had been right in answering his sad words of parting
> with an incredulous smile, as my sister and family were all in good
> health—happy!
> 
> I had not been at sea for a week, before I had cause to remember his
> words of warning!
> 
> From the day of my experience with the magic mirror, I perceived a
> great change in my whole state, and I attributed it, at first, to the
> mental depression I had struggled against for so many months. During
> the day I very often found myself absent from the surrounding scenes,
> losing sight for several minutes of things and persons. My nights were
> disturbed, my dreams oppressive, and at times horrible. Good sailor I
> certainly was; and besides, the weather was unusually fine, the ocean
> as smooth as a pond. Notwithstanding this, I often felt a strange
> giddiness, and the familiar faces of my fellow-passengers assumed at
> such times the most grotesque appearances. Thus, a young German I used
> to know well was once suddenly transformed before my eyes into his old
> father, whom we had laid in the little burial place of the European
> colony some three years before. We were talking on deck of the defunct
> and of a certain business arrangement of his, when Max Grunner’s head
> appeared to me as though it were covered with a strange film. A thick
> greyish mist surrounded him, and gradually condensing around and upon
> his healthy countenance, settled suddenly into the grim old head I
> had myself seen covered with six feet of soil. On another occasion,
> as the captain was talking of a Malay thief whom he had helped to
> secure and lodge in jail, I saw near him the yellow, villainous face
> of a man answering to his description. I kept silence about such
> hallucinations; but as they became more and more frequent, I felt very
> much disturbed, though still attributing them to natural causes, such
> as I had read about in medical books.
> 
> One night I was abruptly wakened by a long and loud cry of distress.
> It was a woman’s voice, plaintive like that of a child, full of terror
> and of helpless despair. I awoke with a start to find myself on land,
> in a strange room. A young girl, almost a child, was desperately
> struggling against a powerful middle-aged man, who had surprised her in
> her own room, and during her sleep. Behind the closed and locked door,
> I saw listening an old woman, whose face, notwithstanding the fiendish
> expression upon it, seemed familiar to me, and I immediately recognized
> it: it was the face of the Jewess who had adopted my niece in the dream
> I had at Kioto. She had received gold to pay for her share in the foul
> crime, and was now keeping her part of the covenant.... But who was the
> victim? O horror unutterable! Unspeakable horror! When I realized the
> situation after coming back to my normal state, I found it was my own
> child-niece.
> 
> But, as in my first vision, I felt in me nothing of the nature of that
> despair born of affection that fills one’s heart, at the sight of a
> wrong done to, or a misfortune befalling, those one loves; nothing but
> a manly indignation in the presence of suffering inflicted upon the
> weak and the helpless. I rushed, of course, to her rescue, and seized
> the wanton, brutal beast by the neck. I fastened upon him with powerful
> grasp, but, the man heeded it not, he seemed not even to feel my hand.
> The coward, seeing himself resisted by the girl, lifted his powerful
> arm, and the thick fist, coming down like a heavy hammer upon the sunny
> locks, felled the child to the ground. It was with a loud cry of the
> indignation of a stranger, not with that of a tigress defending her
> cub, that I sprang upon the lewd beast and sought to throttle him.
> I then remarked, for the first time, that, a shadow myself, I was
> grasping but another shadow!....
> 
> My loud shrieks and imprecations had awakened the whole steamer. They
> were attributed to a nightmare. I did not seek to take anyone into my
> confidence; but, from that day forward, my life became a long series of
> mental tortures, I could hardly shut my eyes without becoming witness
> of some horrible deed, some scene of misery, death or crime, whether
> past, present or even future—as I ascertained later on. It was as
> though some mocking fiend had taken upon himself the task of making
> me go through the vision of everything that was bestial, malignant
> and hopeless, in this world of misery. No radiant vision of beauty
> or virtue ever lit with the faintest ray these pictures of awe and
> wretchedness that I seemed doomed to witness. Scenes of wickedness, of
> murder, of treachery and of lust fell dismally upon my sight, and I was
> brought face to face with the vilest results of man’s passions, the
> most terrible outcome of his material earthly cravings.
> 
> Had the Bonze foreseen, indeed, the dreary results, when he spoke of
> Daij-Dzins to whom I left “an ingress” “a door open” in me? Nonsense!
> There must be some physiological, abnormal change in me. Once at
> Nuremberg, when I have ascertained how false was the direction taken by
> my fears—I dared not hope for no misfortune at all—these meaningless
> visions will disappear as they came. The very fact that my fancy
> follows but one direction, that of pictures of misery, of human
> passions in their worst, material shape, is a proof to me, of their
> unreality.
> 
> “If, as you say, man consists of one substance, matter, the object
> of the physical senses; and if perception with its modes is only the
> result of the organization of the brain, then should we be naturally
> attracted but to the material, the earthly”.... I thought I heard the
> familiar voice of the Bonze interrupting my reflections, and repeating
> an often used argument of his in his discussions with me.
> 
> “There are two planes of visions before men,” I again heard him say,
> “the plane of undying love and spiritual aspirations, the efflux from
> the eternal light; and the plane of restless, ever changing matter, the
> light in which the misguided Daij-Dzins bathe.”
> 
> VII
> 
> ETERNITY IN A SHORT DREAM
> 
> In those days I could hardly bring myself to realize, even for a
> moment, the absurdity of a belief in any kind of spirits, whether good
> or bad. I now understood, if I did not believe, what was meant by the
> term, though I still persisted in hoping that it would finally prove
> some physical derangement or nervous hallucination. To fortify my
> unbelief the more, I tried to bring back to my memory all the arguments
> used against a faith in such superstitions, that I had ever read or
> heard. I recalled the biting sarcasms of Voltaire, the calm reasoning
> of Hume, and I repeated to myself _ad nauseam_ the words of Rousseau,
> who said that superstition, “the disturber of Society,” could never
> be too strongly attacked. “Why should the sight, the phantasmagoria,
> rather”—I argued—“of that which we know in a waking sense to be false,
> come to affect us at all?” Why should—
> 
>     Names, whose sense we see not
>     Fray us with things that be not?
> 
> One day the old captain was narrating to us the various superstitions
> to which sailors were addicted; a pompous English missionary remarked
> that Fielding had declared long ago that “superstition renders a man a
> fool,”—after which he hesitated for an instant, and abruptly stopped.
> I had not taken any part in the general conversation; but no sooner
> had the reverend speaker relieved himself of the quotation, than I saw
> in that halo of vibrating light, which I now noticed almost constantly
> over every human head on the steamer, the words of Fielding’s next
> proposition—“and _scepticism makes him mad_.”
> 
> I had heard and read of the claims of those who pretend to seership,
> that they often see the thoughts of people traced in the aura of those
> present. Whatever “aura” may mean with others, I had now a personal
> experience of the truth of the claim, and felt sufficiently disgusted
> with the discovery! I—a _clairvoyant_! a new horror added to my life,
> an absurd and ridiculous gift developed, which I shall have to conceal
> from all, feeling ashamed of it as if it were a case of leprosy. At
> this moment my hatred to the Yamabooshi, and even to my venerable old
> friend, the Bonze, knew no bounds. The former had evidently by his
> manipulations over me while I was lying unconscious, touched some
> unknown physiological spring in my brain, and by loosing it had called
> forth a faculty generally hidden in the human constitution; and it was
> the Japanese priest who had introduced the wretch into my house!
> 
> But my anger and my curses were alike useless, and could be of no
> avail. Moreover, we were already in European waters, and in a few
> more days we should be at Hamburg. Then would my doubts and fears be
> set at rest, and I should find, to my intense relief, that although
> clairvoyance, as regards the reading of human thoughts on the spot, may
> have some truth in it, the discernment of such events at a distance,
> as I had _dreamed of_, was an impossibility for human faculties.
> Notwithstanding all my reasoning, however, my heart was sick with
> fear, and full of the blackest presentiments; I _felt_ that my doom
> was closing. I suffered terribly, my nervous and mental prostration
> becoming intensified day by day.
> 
> The night before we entered port I had a dream.
> 
> I fancied I was dead. My body lay cold and stiff in its last sleep,
> whilst its dying consciousness, which still regarded itself as “I,”
> realizing the event, was preparing to meet in a few seconds its own
> extinction. It had been always my belief that as the brain preserved
> heat longer than any of the other organs, and was the last to cease its
> activity, the thought in it survived bodily death by several minutes.
> Therefore, I was not in the least surprised to find in my dream that
> while the frame had already crossed that awful gulf “no mortal e’er
> repassed,” its consciousness was still in the gray twilight, the
> first shadows of the great Mystery. Thus my THOUGHT wrapped, as I
> believed, in the remnants, of its now fast retiring vitality, was
> watching with intense and eager curiosity the approaches of its own
> dissolution, _i.e._, of its _annihilation_. “I” was hastening to
> record my last impressions, lest the dark mantle of eternal oblivion
> should envelope me, before I had time to feel and _enjoy_, the great,
> the supreme triumph of learning that my life-long convictions were
> true, that death is a complete and absolute cessation of conscious
> being. Everything around me was getting darker with every moment. Huge
> gray shadows were moving before my vision, slowly at first, then with
> accelerated motion, until they commenced whirling around with an almost
> vertiginous rapidity. Then, as though that motion had taken place only
> for purposes of brewing darkness, the object once reached, it slackened
> its speed, and as the darkness became gradually transformed into
> intense blackness, it ceased altogether. There was nothing now within
> my immediate perceptions, but that fathomless black Space, as dark as
> pitch: to me it appeared as limitless and as silent as the shoreless
> Ocean of Eternity upon which Time, the progeny of man’s brain, is for
> ever gliding, but which it can never cross.
> 
> Dream is defined by Cato as “but the image of our hopes and fears.”
> Having never feared death when awake, I felt, in this dream of mine,
> calm and serene at the idea of my speedy end. In truth, I felt
> rather relieved at the thought—probably owing to my recent mental
> suffering—that the end of all, of doubt, of fear for those I loved,
> of suffering, and of every anxiety, was close at hand. The constant
> anguish that had been gnawing ceaselessly at my heavy, aching heart
> for many a long and weary month, had now become unbearable; and
> if as Seneca thinks, death is but “the ceasing to be what we were
> before,” it was better that I should die. The body is dead; “I,” its
> consciousness—that which is all that remains of me now, for a few
> moments longer—am preparing to follow. Mental perceptions will get
> weaker, more dim and hazy with every second of time, until the longed
> for oblivion envelopes me completely in its cold shroud. Sweet is the
> magic hand of Death, the great World-Comforter; profound and dreamless
> is sleep in its unyielding arms. Yea, verily, it is a welcome
> guest.... A calm and peaceful haven amidst the roaring billows of the
> Ocean of life, whose breakers lash in vain the rock-bound shores of
> Death. Happy the lonely bark that drifts into the still waters of its
> black gulf, after having been so long, so cruelly tossed about by the
> angry waves of sentient life. Moored in it for evermore, needing no
> longer either sail or rudder, my bark will now find rest. Welcome then,
> O Death, at this tempting price; and fare thee well, poor body, which,
> having neither sought it nor derived pleasure from it, I now readily
> give up!...
> 
> While uttering this death-chant to the prostrate form before me, I bent
> over, and examined it with curiosity. I felt the surrounding darkness
> oppressing me, weighing on me almost tangibly, and I fancied I found
> in it the approach of the Liberator I was welcoming. And yet ... how
> very strange! If real, final Death takes place in our consciousness;
> if after the bodily death, “I” and my conscious perceptions are
> one—how is it that these perceptions do not become weaker, why does
> my _brain_-action seem as vigorous as ever now ... that I am _de
> facto_ dead?... Nor does the usual feeling of anxiety, the “heavy
> heart” so-called, decrease in intensity; nay, it even seems to become
> worse ... unspeakably so!... How long it takes for full oblivion to
> arrive!... Ah, here’s my body again!... Vanished out of sight for a
> second or two, it reappears before me once more.... How white and
> ghastly it looks! Yet ... its brain cannot be quite dead, since “I,”
> its consciousness, am still acting, since we two fancy that we still
> are, that we live and think, disconnected from our creator and its
> ideating cell.
> 
> Suddenly I felt a strong desire to see how much longer the progress
> of dissolution was likely to last, before it placed its last seal on
> the brain and rendered it inactive. I examined my brain in its cranial
> cavity, through the (to me) entirely transparent walls and roof of the
> skull, and even _touched the brain-matter_.... How, or with _whose
> hands_, I am now unable to say; but the impression of the slimy,
> intensely cold matter produced a very strong impression on me, in that
> dream. To my great dismay, I found that the blood having entirely
> congealed and the brain-tissues having themselves undergone a change
> that would no longer permit any molecular action, it became impossible
> for me to account for the phenomena now taking place with myself.
> Here was I,—or my consciousness, which is all one—standing apparently
> entirely disconnected from my brain which could no longer function....
> But I had no time left for reflection. A new and most extraordinary
> change in my perceptions had taken place and now engrossed my whole
> attention.... What _does_ this signify?...
> 
> The same darkness was around me as before, a black, impenetrable space,
> extending in every direction. Only now, right before me, in whatever
> direction I was looking, moving with me which way soever I moved,
> there was a gigantic round clock; a disk, whose large white face shone
> ominously on the ebony-black background. As I looked at its huge dial,
> and at the pendulum moving to and fro regularly and slowly in Space, as
> if its swinging meant to divide eternity, I saw its needles pointing to
> _seven minutes past five_. “The hour at which my torture had commenced
> at Kioto!” I had barely found time to think of the coincidence, when,
> to my unutterable horror, I felt myself going through the same, the
> identical, process that I had been made to experience on that memorable
> and fatal day. I swam underground, dashing swiftly through the earth;
> I found myself once more in the pauper’s grave and recognized my
> brother-in-law in the mangled remains; I witnessed his terrible death;
> entered my sister’s house; followed her agony, and saw her go mad. I
> went over the same scenes without missing a single detail of them. But,
> alas! I was no longer iron-bound in the calm indifference that had then
> been mine, and which in that first vision had left me as unfeeling to
> my great misfortune as if I had been a heartless thing of rock. My
> mental tortures were now becoming beyond description and well-nigh
> unbearable. Even the settled despair, the never ceasing anxiety I was
> constantly experiencing when awake, had become now, in my dream and
> in the face of this repetition of visions and events, as an hour of
> darkened sunlight compared to a deadly cyclone. Oh! how I suffered in
> this wealth and pomp of infernal horrors, to which the conviction of
> the survival of man’s consciousness after death—for in that dream I
> firmly believed that my body was dead—added the most terrifying of all!
> 
> The relative relief I felt, when, after going over the last scene,
> I saw once more the great white face of the dial before me was not
> of long duration. The long, arrow-shaped needle was pointing on the
> colossal disk at—_seven minutes and a-half past five_ o’clock. But,
> before I had time to well realize the change, the needle moved slowly
> backwards, stopped at precisely the seventh minute, and—O cursed
> fate!... I found myself driven into a repetition of the same series
> over again! Once more I swam underground, and saw, and heard, and
> suffered every torture that hell can provide; I passed through every
> mental anguish known to man or fiend. I returned to see the fatal dial
> and its needle—after what appeared to me an eternity—moved, as before,
> only half a minute forward. I beheld it, with renewed terror, moving
> back again, and felt myself propelled forward anew. And so it went
> on, and on, and on, time after time, in what seemed to me an endless
> succession, a series which never had any beginning, nor would it ever
> have an end....
> 
> Worst of all; my consciousness, my “I,” had apparently acquired the
> phenomenal capacity of trebling, quadrupling, and even of decuplating
> itself. I lived, felt and suffered, in the same space of time, in
> half-a-dozen different places at once, passing over various events
> of my life, at different epochs, and under the most dissimilar
> circumstances; though predominant over all was my _spiritual_
> experience at Kioto. Thus, as in the famous _fugue_ in _Don Giovanni_,
> the heart-rending notes of Elvira’s _aria_ of despair ring high above,
> but interfere in no way with the melody of the minuet, the song of
> seduction, and the chorus, so I went over and over my travailed woes,
> the feelings of agony unspeakable at the awful sights of my vision,
> the repetition of which blunted in no wise even a single pang of my
> despair and horror; nor did these feelings weaken in the least scenes
> and events entirely disconnected with the first one, that I was living
> through again, or interfere in any way the one with the other. It was a
> maddening experience! A series of contrapuntal, mental phantasmagoria
> from real life. Here was I, during the same half-a-minute of time,
> examining with cold curiosity the mangled remains of my sister’s
> husband; following with the same indifference the effects of the
> news on her brain, as in my first Kioto vision, and feeling _at the
> same time_ hell-torture for these very events, as when I returned to
> consciousness. I was listening to the philosophical discourses of the
> Bonze, every word of which I heard and understood, and was trying
> to laugh him to scorn. I was again a child, then a youth, hearing my
> mother’s and my sweet sister’s voices, admonishing me and teaching duty
> to all men. I was saving a friend from drowning, and was sneering at
> his aged father who thanks me for having saved a “soul” yet unprepared
> to meet his Maker.
> 
> “Speak of _dual_ consciousness, you psycho-physiologists!”—I cried, in
> one of the moments when agony, mental and as it seemed to me physical
> also, had arrived at a degree of intensity which would have killed
> a dozen living men; “speak of your psychological and physiological
> experiments, you schoolmen, puffed up with pride and book-learning!
> Here am I to give you the lie....” And now I was reading the works and
> holding converse with learned professors and lecturers, who had led
> me to my fatal scepticism. And, while arguing the impossibility of
> consciousness divorced from its brain, I was shedding tears of blood
> over the supposed fate of my nieces and nephews. More terrible than
> all: I knew, _as only a liberated consciousness can know_, that all I
> had seen in my vision at Japan, and all that I was seeing and hearing
> over and over again now, was true in every point and detail, that it
> was a long string of ghastly and terrible, still of real, actual, facts.
> 
> For, perhaps, the hundredth time, I had rivetted my attention on
> the needle of the clock, I had lost the number of my gyrations and
> was fast coming to the conclusion that they would never stop, that
> consciousness, is, after all, indestructible, and that this was to be
> my punishment in Eternity. I was beginning to realize from personal
> experience how the condemned sinners would feel—“were not eternal
> damnation a logical and mathematical impossibility in an ever
> progressing Universe”—I still found the force to argue. Yea, indeed; at
> this hour of my ever-increasing agony, my consciousness—now my synonym
> for “I”—had still the power of revolting at certain theological claims,
> of denying all their propositions, all—save ITSELF.... No; I denied the
> independent nature of my consciousness no longer, for I knew it now
> to be such. But is it _eternal_ withal? O thou incomprehensible and
> terrible Reality! But if thou art eternal, who then art thou?—since
> there is no deity, no God. Whence dost thou come, and when didst thou
> first appear, if thou art not a part of the cold body lying yonder?
> And whither dost thou lead me, who am thyself, and shall our thought
> and fancy have an end? What is thy real name, thou unfathomable
> REALITY, and impenetrable MYSTERY! Oh, I would fain annihilate thee....
> “Soul-Vision”!--who speaks of Soul, and whose voice is this?... It says
> that I see now for myself, that there is a Soul in man, after all.... I
> deny this. My Soul, my vital Soul, or the Spirit of life, has expired
> with my body, with the gray matter of my brain. This “I” of mine, this
> consciousness, is not yet proven to me as eternal. Reincarnation, in
> which the Bonze felt so anxious I should believe may be true.... Why
> not? Is not the flower born year after year from the same root? Hence
> this “I” once separated from its brain, losing its balance, and calling
> forth such a host of visions ... before reincarnating....
> 
> I was again face to face with the inexorable, fatal clock. And as I was
> watching its needle, I heard the voice of the Bonze, coming out of the
> depths of its white face, saying: “In this case, I fear, _you would
> only have to open and to shut the temple door, over and over again,
> during a period which, however short, would seem to you an
> eternity_.”...
> 
> The clock had vanished, darkness made room for light, the voice of my
> old friend was drowned by a multitude of voices overhead on deck; and
> I awoke in my berth, covered with a cold perspiration, and faint with
> terror.
> 
> VIII
> 
> A TALE OF WOE
> 
> We were at Hamburg, and no sooner had I seen my partners, who could
> hardly recognize me, than with their consent and good wishes I started
> for Nuremberg.
> 
> Half-an-hour after my arrival, the last doubt with regard to the
> correctness of my vision had disappeared. The reality was worse than
> any expectations could have made it, and I was henceforward doomed to
> the most desolate life. I ascertained that I had seen the terrible
> tragedy with all its heartrending details. My brother-in-law, killed
> under the wheels of a machine; my sister, insane, and now rapidly
> sinking towards her end; my niece—the sweet flower of nature’s fairest
> work—dishonored, in a den of infamy; the little children dead of a
> contagious disease in an orphanage; my last surviving nephew at sea,
> no one knew where. A whole house, a home of love and peace, scattered;
> and I, left alone, a witness of this world of death, of desolation
> and dishonor. The news filled me with infinite despair, and I sank
> helpless before this wholesale, dire disaster, which rose before me
> all at once. The shock proved too much, and I fainted. The last thing
> I heard before entirely losing my consciousness was a remark of the
> Burgmeister: “Had you, before leaving Kioto, telegraphed to the city
> authorities of your whereabouts, and of your intention of coming home
> to take charge of your young relatives, we might have placed them
> elsewhere, and thus have saved them from their fate. No one knew that
> the children had a well-to-do relative. They were left paupers and
> had to be dealt with as such. They were comparatively strangers in
> Nuremberg, and under the unfortunate circumstances you could hardly
> have expected anything else.... I can only express my sincere sorrow.”
> 
> It was this terrible knowledge that I might, at any rate, have saved
> my young niece from her unmerited fate, but that through my neglect I
> had not done so, that was killing me. Had I but followed the friendly
> advice of the Bonze, Tamoora, and telegraphed to the authorities some
> weeks previous to my return much might have been avoided. It was all
> this, coupled with the fact that I could no longer doubt clairvoyance
> and clairaudience—the possibility of which I had so long denied—that
> brought me so heavily down upon my knees. I could avoid the censure
> of my fellow-creatures, but I could never escape the stings of my
> conscience, the reproaches of my own aching heart—no, not as long as I
> lived. I cursed my stubborn scepticism, my denial of facts, my early
> education, I cursed myself, and the whole world....
> 
> For several days I contrived not to sink beneath my load, for I had
> a duty to perform to the dead and to the living. But my sister once
> rescued from the pauper’s asylum, placed under the care of the best
> physicians, with her daughter to attend to her last moments, and
> the Jewess, whom I had brought to confess her crime, safely lodged
> in jail—my fortitude and strength suddenly abandoned me. Hardly a
> week after my arrival I was myself no better than a raving maniac,
> helpless in the strong grip of a brain fever. For several weeks I lay
> between life and death, the terrible disease defying the skill of the
> best physicians. At last my strong constitution prevailed, and—to my
> life-long sorrow—they proclaimed me saved.
> 
> I heard the news with a bleeding heart. Doomed to drag the loathsome
> burden of life henceforth alone, and in constant remorse; hoping for
> no help or remedy on earth, and still refusing to believe in the
> possibility of anything better than a short survival of consciousness
> beyond the grave, this unexpected return to life added only one more
> drop of gall to my bitter feelings. They were hardly soothed by the
> immediate return, during the first days of my convalescence, of those
> unwelcome and unsought for visions, whose correctness and reality I
> could deny no more. Alas the day! they were no longer in my sceptical,
> blind mind—
> 
>     The children of an idle brain
>     Begot of nothing but vain fantasy;
> 
> but always the faithful photographs of the real woes and sufferings
> of my fellow creatures, of my best friends.... Thus I found myself
> doomed, whenever I was left for a moment alone, to the helpless
> torture of a chained Prometheus. During the still hours of night,
> as though held by some pitiless iron hand, I found myself led to my
> sister’s bedside, forced to watch there hour after hour, and see the
> silent disintegration of her wasted organism; to witness and feel the
> sufferings that her own tenantless brain could no longer reflect or
> convey to her perceptions. But there was something still more horrible
> to barb the dart that could never be extricated. I had to look, by
> day, at the childish innocent face of my young niece, so sublimely
> simple and guileless in her pollution; and to witness, by night, how
> the full knowledge and recollection of her dishonor, of her young life
> now for ever blasted, came to her in her dreams, as soon as she was
> asleep. These dreams took an objective form to me, as they had done
> on the steamer; I had to live them over again, night after night,
> and feel the same terrible despair. For now, since I believed in the
> reality of seership, and had come to the conclusion that in our bodies
> lies hidden, as in the caterpillar, the chrysalis which may contain
> in its turn the butterfly—the symbol of the soul—I no longer remained
> indifferent, as of yore, to what I witnessed in my Soul-life. Something
> had suddenly developed in me, had broken loose from its icy cocoon.
> Evidently I no longer saw only in consequence of the identification of
> my inner nature with a Daij-Dzin; my visions arose in consequence of a
> direct personal psychic development, the fiendish creatures only taking
> care that I should see nothing of an agreeable or elevating nature.
> Thus, now, not an unconscious pang in my dying sister’s emaciated body,
> not a thrill of horror in my niece’s restless sleep at the recollection
> of the crime perpetrated upon her, an innocent child, but found a
> responsive echo in my bleeding heart. The deep fountain of sympathetic
> love and sorrow had gushed out from the physical heart, and was now
> loudly echoed by the awakened soul separated from the body. Thus had I
> to drain the cup of misery to the very dregs! Woe is me, it was a daily
> and nightly torture! Oh, how I mourned over my proud folly; how I was
> punished for having neglected to avail myself at Kioto of the proffered
> purification, for now I had come to believe even in the efficacy of
> the latter. The Daij-Dzin had indeed obtained control over me; and the
> fiend had let loose all the dogs of hell upon his victim....
> 
> At last the awful gulf was reached and crossed. The poor insane
> martyr dropped into her dark, and now welcome grave, leaving behind
> her, but for a few short months, her young, her first-born, daughter.
> Consumption made short work of that tender girlish frame. Hardly a year
> after my arrival, I was left alone in the whole wide world, my only
> surviving nephew having expressed a desire to follow his sea-faring
> career.
> 
> And now, the sequel of my sad, sad story is soon told. A wreck, a
> prematurely old man, looking at thirty as though sixty winters had
> passed over my doomed head, and owing to the never-ceasing visions,
> myself daily on the verge of insanity, I suddenly formed a desperate
> resolution. I would return to Kioto and seek out the Yamabooshi. I
> would prostrate myself at the feet of the holy man, and would not
> leave him until he had recalled the Frankenstein he had raised, the
> Frankenstein with whom at the time, it was I, myself, who would not
> part, through my insolent pride and unbelief.
> 
> Three months later I was in my Japanese home again, and I at once
> sought out my old, venerable Bonze, Tamoora Hideyeri, I now implored
> him to take me without an hour’s delay, to the Yamabooshi, the innocent
> cause of my daily tortures. His answer but placed the last, the supreme
> seal on my doom and tenfold intensified my despair. The Yamabooshi had
> left the country for lands unknown! He had departed one fine morning
> into the interior, on a pilgrimage, and according to custom, would be
> absent, unless natural death shortened the period, for no less than
> seven years!...
> 
> In this mischance, I applied for help and protection to other learned
> Yamabooshis; and though well aware how useless it was in my case to
> seek efficient cure from any other “adept,” my excellent old friend
> did everything he could to help me in my misfortune. But it was to
> no purpose, and the canker-worm of my life’s despair could not be
> thoroughly extricated. I found from them that not one of these learned
> men could promise to relieve me entirely from the demon of clairvoyant
> obsession. It was he who raised certain Daij-Dzins, calling on them to
> show futurity, or things that had already come to pass, who alone had
> full control over them. With kind sympathy, which I had now learned
> to appreciate, the holy men invited me to join the group of their
> disciples, and learn from them what I could do for myself. “Will alone,
> faith in your own soul powers, can help you now,” they said. “But it
> may take several years to undo even a part of the great mischief;”
> they added. “A Daij-Dzin is easily dislodged in the beginning; if left
> alone, he takes possession of a man’s nature, and it becomes almost
> impossible to uproot the fiend without killing his victim.”
> 
> Persuaded that there was nothing but this left for me to do, I
> gratefully assented, doing my best to believe in all that these holy
> men believed in, and yet ever failing to do so in my heart. The demon
> of unbelief and all-denial seemed rooted in me more firmly even than
> the Daij-Dzin. Still I did all I could do, decided as I was not to
> lose my last chance of salvation. Therefore, I proceeded without delay
> to free myself from the world and my commercial obligations, in order
> to live for several years an independent life. I settled my accounts
> with my Hamburg partners and severed my connection with the firm.
> Notwithstanding considerable financial losses resulting from such a
> precipitate liquidation, I found myself, after closing the accounts,
> a far richer man than I had thought I was. But wealth had no longer
> any attraction for me, now that I had no one to share it with, no one
> to work for. Life had become a burden; and such was my indifference to
> my future, that while giving away all my fortune to my nephew—in case
> he should return alive from his sea voyage—I should have neglected
> entirely even a small provision for myself, had not my native partner
> interfered and insisted upon my making it. I now recognized with
> Lao-tze, that Knowledge was the only firm hold for a man to trust to,
> as it is the only one that cannot be shaken by any tempest. Wealth
> is a weak anchor in days of sorrow, and self-conceit the most fatal
> counsellor. Hence I followed the advice of my friends, and laid aside
> for myself a modest sum, which would be sufficient to assure me a small
> income for life, or if I ever left my new friends and instructors.
> Having settled my earthly accounts and disposed of my belongings at
> Kioto, I joined the “Masters of the Long Vision,” who took me to their
> mysterious abode. There I remained for several years, studying very
> earnestly and in the most complete solitude, seeing no one but a few of
> the members of our religious community.
> 
> Many are the mysteries of nature that I have fathomed since then, and
> many a secret folio from the library of Tzion-ene have I devoured,
> obtaining thereby mastery over several kinds of invisible beings
> of a lower order. But the great secret of power over the terrible
> Daij-Dzin I could not get. It remains in the possession of a very
> limited number of the highest Initiates of Lao-tze, the great
> majority of the Yamabooshis themselves being ignorant how to obtain
> such mastery over the dangerous Elemental. One who would reach such
> power of control would have to become entirely identified with the
> Yamabooshis, to accept their views and beliefs, and to attain the
> highest degree of Initiation. Very naturally, I was found unfit to
> join the Fraternity, owing to many insurmountable reasons besides my
> congenital and ineradicable scepticism, though I tried hard to believe.
> Thus, partially relieved of my affliction and taught how to conjure the
> unwelcome visions away, I still remained, and do remain to this day,
> helpless to prevent their forced appearance before me now and then.
> 
> It was after assuring myself of my unfitness for the exalted position
> of an independent Seer and Adept that I reluctantly gave up any further
> trial. Nothing had been heard of the holy man, the first innocent cause
> of my misfortune; and the old Bonze himself, who occasionally visited
> me in my retreat, either could not, or would not, inform me of the
> whereabouts of the Yamabooshi. When, therefore, I had to give up all
> hope of his ever relieving me entirely from my fatal gift, I resolved
> to return to Europe, to settle in solitude for the rest of my life.
> With this object in view, I purchased through my late partners the
> Swiss _châlet_ in which my hapless sister and I were born, where I had
> grown up under her care, and selected it for my future hermitage.
> 
> When bidding me farewell for ever on the steamer which took me back
> to my fatherland, the good old Bonze tried to console me for my
> disappointments. “My son,” he said, “regard all that happened to you
> as your _Karma_—a just retribution. No one who has subjected himself
> willingly to the power of a Daij-Dzin can ever hope to become a _Rahat_
> (an Adept), a high-souléd Yamabooshi—unless immediately purified.
> At best, as in your case, he may become fitted to oppose and to
> successfully fight off the fiend. _Like a scar left after a poisonous
> wound, the trace of a Daij-Dzin can never be effaced from the Soul
> until purified by a new rebirth._ Withal, feel not dejected, but be of
> good cheer in your affliction, since it has led you to acquire true
> knowledge, and to accept many a truth you would have otherwise rejected
> with contempt. And of this priceless knowledge, acquired through
> suffering and personal efforts—no Daij-Dzin can ever deprive you.
> Fare thee well, then, and may the Mother of Mercy, the great Queen of
> Heaven, afford you comfort and protection.”
> 
> We parted, and since then I have led the life of an anchorite, in
> constant solitude and study. Though still occasionally afflicted,
> I do not regret the years I have passed under the instruction of
> the Yamabooshis, but feel gratified for the knowledge received. Of
> the priest Tamoora Hideyeri I think always with sincere affection
> and respect. I corresponded regularly with him to the day of his
> death; an event which, with all its to me painful details, I had the
> unthanked-for privilege of witnessing across the seas, at the very hour
> in which it occurred.
> 
> THE CAVE OF THE ECHOES
> 
> A STRANGE BUT TRUE STORY[2]
> 
>       [2] This story is given from the narrative of an eye-witness,
>       a Russian gentleman, very pious, and fully trustworthy.
>       Moreover, the facts are copied from the police records of P——.
>       The eyewitness in question attributes it, of course, partly to
>       divine interference and partly to the Evil One.—H. P. B.
> 
> In one of the distant governments of the Russian empire, in a small
> town on the borders of Siberia, a mysterious tragedy occurred more
> than thirty years ago. About six versts from the little town of P——,
> famous for the wild beauty of its scenery, and for the wealth of its
> inhabitants—generally proprietors of mines and of iron foundries—stood
> an aristocratic mansion. Its household consisted of the master, a rich
> old bachelor and his brother, who was a widower and the father of
> two sons and three daughters. It was known that the proprietor, Mr.
> Izvertzoff, had adopted his brother’s children, and, having formed an
> especial attachment for his eldest nephew, Nicolas, he had made him the
> sole heir of his numerous estates.
> 
> Time rolled on. The uncle was getting old, the nephew was coming of
> age. Days and years had passed in monotonous serenity, when, on the
> hitherto clear horizon of the quiet family, appeared a cloud. On an
> unlucky day one of the nieces took it into her head to study the
> zither. The instrument being of purely Teutonic origin, and no teacher
> of it residing in the neighborhood, the indulgent uncle sent to St.
> Petersburg for both. After diligent search only one Professor could be
> found willing to trust himself in such close proximity to Siberia. It
> was an old German artist, who, sharing his affections equally between
> his instrument and a pretty blonde daughter, would part with neither.
> And thus it came to pass that one fine morning the old Professor
> arrived at the mansion, with his music box under one arm and his fair
> Munchen leaning on the other.
> 
> From that day the little cloud began growing rapidly; for every
> vibration of the melodious instrument found a responsive echo in the
> old bachelor’s heart. Music awakens love, they say, and the work begun
> by the zither was completed by Munchen’s blue eyes. At the expiration
> of six months the niece had become an expert zither player, and the
> uncle was desperately in love.
> 
> One morning, gathering his adopted family around him, he embraced them
> all very tenderly, promised to remember them in his will, and wound up
> by declaring his unalterable resolution to marry the blue-eyed Munchen.
> After this he fell upon their necks and wept in silent rapture. The
> family, understanding that they were cheated out of the inheritance,
> also wept; but it was for another cause. Having thus wept, they
> consoled themselves and tried to rejoice, for the old gentleman was
> sincerely beloved by all. Not all of them rejoiced, though. Nicolas,
> who had himself been smitten to the heart by the pretty German, and
> who found himself defrauded at once of his belle and of his uncle’s
> money, neither rejoiced nor consoled himself, but disappeared for a
> whole day.
> 
> Meanwhile, Mr. Izvertzoff had given orders to prepare his traveling
> carriage on the following day, and it was whispered that he was going
> to the chief town of the district, at some distance from his home,
> with the intention of altering his will. Though very wealthy, he had
> no superintendent on his estate, but kept his books himself. The same
> evening after supper, he was heard in his room, angrily scolding his
> servant, who had been in his service for over thirty years. This man,
> Ivan, was a native of northern Asia, from Kamschatka; he had been
> brought up by the family in the Christian religion, and was thought to
> be very much attached to his master. A few days later, when the first
> tragic circumstance I am about to relate had brought all the police
> force to the spot, it was remembered that on that night Ivan was drunk;
> that his master, who had a horror of this vice had paternally thrashed
> him, and turned him out of his room, and that Ivan had been seen
> reeling out of the door, and had been heard to mutter threats.
> 
> On the vast domain of Mr. Izvertzoff there was a curious cavern, which
> excited the curiosity of all who visited it. It exists to this day, and
> is well known to every inhabitant of P——. A pine forest, commencing
> a few feet from the garden gate, climbs in steep terraces up a long
> range of rocky hills, which it covers with a broad belt of impenetrable
> vegetation. The grotto leading into the cavern, which is known as the
> “Cave of the Echoes,” is situated about half a mile from the site
> of the mansion, from which it appears as a small excavation in the
> hill-side, almost hidden by luxuriant plants, but not so completely
> as to prevent any person entering it from being readily seen from the
> terrace in front of the house. Entering the Grotto, the explorer finds
> at the rear a narrow cleft; having passed through which he emerges into
> a lofty cavern, feebly lighted through fissures in the vaulted roof,
> fifty feet from the ground. The cavern itself is immense, and would
> easily hold between two and three thousand people. A part of it, in the
> days of Mr. Izvertzoff, was paved with flagstones, and was often used
> in the summer as a ball-room by picnic parties. Of an irregular oval,
> it gradually narrows into a broad corridor, which runs for several
> miles underground, opening here and there into other chambers, as large
> and lofty as the ball-room, but, unlike this, impassable otherwise than
> in a boat, as they are always full of water. These natural basins have
> the reputation of being unfathomable.
> 
> On the margin of the first of these is a small platform, with several
> mossy rustic seats arranged on it, and it is from this spot that the
> phenomenal echoes, which give the cavern its name, are heard in all
> their weirdness. A word pronounced in a whisper, or even a sigh, is
> caught up by endless mocking voices, and instead of diminishing in
> volume, as honest echoes do, the sound grows louder and louder at
> every successive repetition, until at last it bursts forth like the
> repercussion of a pistol shot, and recedes in a plaintive wail down the
> corridor.
> 
> On the day in question, Mr. Izvertzoff had mentioned his intention of
> having a dancing party in this cave on his wedding day, which he had
> fixed for an early date. On the following morning, while preparing for
> his drive, he was seen by his family entering the grotto, accompanied
> only by his Siberian servant. Half-an-hour later, Ivan returned to the
> mansion for a snuff-box, which his master had forgotten in his room,
> and went back with it to the cave. An hour later the whole house was
> startled by his loud cries. Pale and dripping with water, Ivan rushed
> in like a madman, and declared that Mr. Izvertzoff was nowhere to be
> found in the cave. Thinking he had fallen into the lake, he had dived
> into the first basin in search of him and was nearly drowned himself.
> 
> The day passed in vain attempts to find the body. The police filled the
> house, and louder than the rest in his despair was Nicolas, the nephew,
> who had returned home only to meet the sad tidings.
> 
> A dark suspicion fell upon Ivan, the Siberian. He had been struck by
> his master the night before, and had been heard to swear revenge. He
> had accompanied him alone to the cave, and when his room was searched,
> a box full of rich family jewelry, known to have been carefully kept
> in Mr. Izvertzoff’s apartment, was found under Ivan’s bedding. Vainly
> did the serf call God to witness that the box had been given to him
> in charge by his master himself, just before they proceeded to the
> cave; that it was the latter’s purpose to have the jewelry reset, as
> he intended it for a wedding present to his bride; and that he, Ivan,
> would willingly give his own life to recall that of his master, if
> he knew him to be dead. No heed was paid to him, however, and he was
> arrested and thrown into prison upon a charge of murder. There he was
> left, for under the Russian law a criminal cannot—at any rate, he could
> not in those days—be sentenced for a crime, however conclusive the
> circumstantial evidence, unless he confessed his guilt.
> 
> After a week had passed in useless search, the family arrayed
> themselves in deep mourning; and, as the will as originally drawn
> remained without a codicil, the whole of the property passed into the
> hands of the nephew. The old teacher and his daughter bore this sudden
> reverse of fortune with true Germanic phlegm, and prepared to depart.
> Taking again his zither under one arm, the old man was about to lead
> away his Munchen by the other, when the nephew stopped him by offering
> himself as the fair damsel’s husband in the place of his departed
> uncle. The change was found to be an agreeable one, and, without much
> ado, the young people were married.
> 
>        *       *       *       *       *
> 
> Ten years rolled away, and we meet the happy family once more at the
> beginning of 1859. The fair Munchen had grown fat and vulgar. From
> the day of the old man’s disappearance, Nicolas had become morose and
> retired in his habits, and many wondered at the change in him, for now
> he was never seen to smile. It seemed as if his only aim in life were
> to find out his uncle’s murderer, or rather to bring Ivan to confess
> his guilt. But the man still persisted that he was innocent.
> 
> An only son had been born to the young couple, and a strange child
> it was. Small, delicate, and ever ailing, his frail life seemed to
> hang by a thread. When his features were in repose, his resemblance
> to his uncle was so striking that the members of the family often
> shrank from him in terror. It was the pale shriveled face of a man
> of sixty upon the shoulders of a child nine years old. He was never
> seen either to laugh or to play, but, perched in his high chair, would
> gravely sit there, folding his arms in a way peculiar to the late Mr.
> Izvertzoff; and thus he would remain for hours, drowsy and motionless.
> His nurses were often seen furtively crossing themselves at night, upon
> approaching him, and not one of them would consent to sleep alone with
> him in the nursery. His father’s behavior towards him was still more
> strange. He seemed to love him passionately, and at the same time to
> hate him bitterly. He seldom embraced or caressed the child, but, with
> livid cheek and staring eye, he would pass long hours watching him, as
> the child sat quietly in his corner, in his goblin-like, old-fashioned
> way.
> 
> The child had never left the estate, and few outside the family knew of
> his existence.
> 
> About the middle of July, a tall Hungarian traveler, preceded by a
> great reputation for eccentricity, wealth and mysterious powers,
> arrived at the town of P—— from the North, where, it was said, he had
> resided for many years. He settled in the little town, in company
> with a Shaman or South Siberian magician, on whom he was said to make
> mesmeric experiments. He gave dinners and parties, and invariably
> exhibited his Shaman, of whom he felt very proud, for the amusement of
> his guests. One day the notables of P—— made an unexpected invasion of
> the domains of Nicolas Izvertzoff, and requested the loan of his cave
> for an evening entertainment. Nicolas consented with great reluctance,
> and only after still greater hesitancy was he prevailed upon to join
> the party.
> 
> The first cavern and the platform beside the bottomless lake glittered
> with lights. Hundreds of flickering candles and torches, stuck in
> the clefts of the rocks, illuminated the place and drove the shadows
> from the mossy nooks and corners, where they had crouched undisturbed
> for many years. The stalactites on the walls sparkled brightly, and
> the sleeping echoes were suddenly awakened by a joyous confusion of
> laughter and conversation. The Shaman, who was never lost sight of by
> his friend and patron, sat in a corner, entranced as usual. Crouched
> on a projecting rock, about midway between the entrance and the water,
> with his lemon-yellow, wrinkled face, flat nose, and thin beard, he
> looked more like an ugly stone idol than a human being. Many of the
> company pressed around him and received correct answers to their
> questions, the Hungarian cheerfully submitting his mesmerized “subject”
> to cross-examination.
> 
> Suddenly one of the party, a lady, remarked that it was in that very
> cave that old Mr. Izvertzoff had so unaccountably disappeared ten years
> before. The foreigner appeared interested, and desired to learn more of
> the circumstances, so Nicolas was sought amid the crowd and led before
> the eager group. He was the host and he found it impossible to refuse
> the demanded narrative. He repeated the sad tale in a trembling voice,
> with a pallid cheek, and tears were seen glittering in his feverish
> eyes. The company were greatly affected, and encomiums upon the
> behavior of the loving nephew in honoring the memory of his uncle and
> benefactor were freely circulating in whispers, when suddenly the voice
> of Nicolas became choked, his eyes started from their sockets, and with
> a suppressed groan, he staggered back. Every eye in the crowd followed
> with curiosity his haggard look, as it fell and remained riveted upon a
> weazened little face, that peeped from behind the back of the Hungarian.
> 
> “Where do you come from? Who brought you here, child?” gasped out
> Nicolas, as pale as death.
> 
> “I was in bed, papa; this man came to me, and brought me here in his
> arms,” answered the boy simply, pointing to the Shaman, beside whom
> he stood upon the rock, and who, with his eyes closed, kept swaying
> himself to and fro like a living pendulum.
> 
> “That is very strange,” remarked one of the guests, “for the man has
> never moved from his place.”
> 
> “Good God! what an extraordinary resemblance!” muttered an old resident
> of the town, a friend of the lost man.
> 
> “You lie, child!” fiercely exclaimed the father. “Go to bed; this is no
> place for you.”
> 
> “Come, come,” interposed the Hungarian, with a strange expression on
> his face, and encircling with his arm the slender childish figure; “the
> little fellow has seen the double of my Shaman, which roams sometimes
> far away from his body, and has mistaken the phantom for the man
> himself. Let him remain with us for a while.”
> 
> At these strange words the guests stared at each other in mute
> surprise, while some piously made the sign of the cross, spitting
> aside, presumably at the devil and all his works.
> 
> “By-the-bye,” continued the Hungarian with a peculiar firmness of
> accent, and addressing the company rather than any one in particular;
> “why should we not try, with the help of my Shaman, to unravel the
> mystery hanging over the tragedy? Is the suspected party still lying
> in prison? What? he has not confessed up to now? This is surely very
> strange. But now we will learn the truth in a few minutes! Let all keep
> silent!”
> 
> He then approached the Tehuktchene, and immediately began his
> performance without so much as asking the consent of the master of
> the place. The latter stood rooted to the spot, as if petrified with
> horror, and unable to articulate a word. The suggestion met with
> general approbation, save from him; and the police inspector, Col. S——,
> especially approved of the idea.
> 
> “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the mesmerizer in soft tones, “allow
> me for this once to proceed otherwise than in my general fashion. I
> will employ the method of native magic. It is more appropriate to this
> wild place, and far more effective as you will find, than our European
> method of mesmerization.”
> 
> Without waiting for an answer, he drew from a bag that never left his
> person, first a small drum, and then two little phials—one full of
> fluid, the other empty. With the contents of the former he sprinkled
> the Shaman, who fell to trembling and nodding more violently than ever.
> The air was filled with the perfume of spicy odors, and the atmosphere
> itself seemed to become clearer. Then, to the horror of those present,
> he approached the Tibetan, and taking a miniature stiletto from his
> pocket, he plunged the sharp steel into the man’s forearm, and drew
> blood from it, which he caught in the empty phial. When it was half
> filled, he pressed the orifice of the wound with his thumb, and stopped
> the flow of blood as easily as if he had corked a bottle, after which
> he sprinkled the blood over the little boy’s head. He then suspended
> the drum from his neck, and, with two ivory drum-sticks, which were
> covered with magic signs and letters, he began beating a sort of
> _réveille_, to drum up the spirits, as he said.
> 
> The bystanders, half-shocked and half-terrified by these extraordinary
> proceedings, eagerly crowded round him, and for a few moments a dead
> silence reigned throughout the lofty cavern. Nicolas, with his face
> livid and corpse-like, stood speechless as before. The mesmerizer had
> placed himself between the Shaman and the platform, when he began
> slowly drumming. The first notes were muffled, and vibrated so softly
> in the air that they awakened no echo, but the Shaman quickened his
> pendulum-like motion and the child became restless. The drummer then
> began a slow chant, low, impressive and solemn.
> 
> As the unknown words issued from his lips, the flames of the candles
> and torches wavered and flickered, until they began dancing in rhythm
> with the chant. A cold wind came wheezing from the dark corridors
> beyond the water, leaving a plaintive echo in its trail. Then a sort
> of nebulous vapor, seeming to ooze from the rocky ground and walls,
> gathered about the Shaman and the boy. Around the latter the aura was
> silvery and transparent, but the cloud which enveloped the former was
> red and sinister. Approaching nearer to the platform the magician beat
> a louder roll upon the drum, and this time the echo caught it up with
> terrific effect! It reverberated near and far in incessant peals; one
> wail followed another, louder and louder, until the thundering roar
> seemed the chorus of a thousand demon voices rising from the fathomless
> depths of the lake. The water itself, whose surface, illuminated by
> many lights, had previously been smooth as a sheet of glass, became
> suddenly agitated, as if a powerful gust of wind had swept over its
> unruffled face.
> 
> Another chant, and a roll of the drum, and the mountain trembled to its
> foundation with the cannon-like peals which rolled through the dark
> and distant corridors. The Shaman’s body rose two yards in the air,
> and nodding and swaying, sat, self-suspended like an apparition. But
> the transformation which now occurred in the boy chilled everyone, as
> they speechlessly watched the scene. The silvery cloud about the boy
> now seemed to lift him, too, into the air; but, unlike the Shaman, his
> feet never left the ground. The child began to grow, as though the work
> of years was miraculously accomplished in a few seconds. He became
> tall and large, and his senile features grew older with the ageing
> of his body. A few more seconds, and the youthful form had entirely
> disappeared. It was totally absorbed in another individuality, and to
> the horror of those present who had been familiar with his appearance,
> this individuality was that of old Mr. Izvertzoff, and on his temple
> was a large gaping wound, from which trickled great drops of blood.
> 
> This phantom moved towards Nicolas, till it stood directly in front
> of him, while he, with his hair standing erect, with the look of a
> madman gazed at his own son, transformed into his uncle. The sepulchral
> silence was broken by the Hungarian, who, addressing the child phantom,
> asked him in solemn voice:
> 
> “In the name of the great Master, of him who has all power, answer the
> truth, and nothing but the truth. Restless spirit, hast thou been lost
> by accident, or foully murdered?”
> 
> The specter’s lips moved, but it was the echo which answered for them
> in lugubrious shouts: “Murdered! murdered!! mur-der-ed!!!”
> 
> “Where? How? By whom?” asked the conjuror.
> 
> The apparition pointed a finger at Nicolas and, without removing its
> gaze or lowering its arm, retreated backwards slowly towards the lake.
> At every step it took, the younger Izvertzoff, as if compelled by some
> irresistible fascination, advanced a step towards it, until the phantom
> reached the lake, and the next moment was seen gliding on its surface.
> It was a fearful, ghostly scene!
> 
> When he had come within two steps of the brink of the watery abyss, a
> violent convulsion ran through the frame of the guilty man. Flinging
> himself upon his knees, he clung to one of the rustic seats with a
> desperate clutch, and staring wildly, uttered a long piercing cry of
> agony. The phantom now remained motionless on the water, and bending
> its extended finger, slowly beckoned him to come. Crouched in abject
> terror, the wretched man shrieked until the cavern rang again and
> again: “I did not.... No, I did not murder you!”
> 
> Then came a splash, and now it was the boy who was in the dark water,
> struggling for his life, in the middle of the lake, with the same
> motionless stern apparition brooding over him.
> 
> “Papa! papa! Save me.... I am drowning!” ... cried a piteous little
> voice amid the uproar of the mocking echoes.
> 
> “My boy!” shrieked Nicolas, in the accents of a maniac, springing to
> his feet. “My boy! Save him! Oh, save him!... Yes, I confess.... I am
> the murderer.... It is I who killed him!”
> 
> Another splash, and the phantom disappeared. With a cry of horror the
> company rushed towards the platform; but their feet were suddenly
> rooted to the ground, as they saw amid the swirling eddies a whitish
> shapeless mass holding the murderer and the boy in tight embrace, and
> slowly sinking into the bottomless lake.
> 
> On the morning after these occurrences, when, after a sleepless night,
> some of the party visited the residence of the Hungarian gentleman,
> they found it closed and deserted. He and the Shaman had disappeared.
> Many are among the old inhabitants of P—— who remember him; the Police
> Inspector, Col. S——, dying a few years ago in the full assurance that
> the noble traveler was the devil. To add to the general consternation
> the Izvertzoff mansion took fire on that same night and was completely
> destroyed. The Archbishop performed the ceremony of exorcism, but
> the locality is considered accursed to this day. The Government
> investigated the facts, and—ordered silence.
> 
> THE LUMINOUS SHIELD
> 
> We were a small and select party of light-hearted travelers. We had
> arrived at Constantinople a week before from Greece, and had devoted
> fourteen hours a day ever since to toiling up and down the steep
> heights of Pera, visiting bazaars, climbing to the tops of minarets and
> fighting our way through armies of hungry dogs, the traditional masters
> of the streets of Stamboul. Nomadic life is infectious, they say, and
> no civilization is strong enough to destroy the charm of unrestrained
> freedom when it has once been tasted. The gipsy cannot be tempted
> from his tent, and even the common tramp finds a fascination in his
> comfortless and precarious existence, that prevents him taking to any
> fixed abode and occupation. To guard my spaniel Ralph from falling a
> victim to this infection, and joining the canine Bedouins that infested
> the streets, was my chief care during our stay in Constantinople. He
> was a fine fellow, my constant companion and cherished friend. Afraid
> of losing him, I kept a strict watch over his movements; for the
> first three days, however, he behaved like a tolerably well-educated
> quadruped, and remained faithfully at my heels. At every impudent
> attack from his Mahomedan cousins, whether intended as a hostile
> demonstration or an overture of friendship, his only reply would be to
> draw in his tail between his legs, and with an air of dignified modesty
> seek protection under the wing of one or other of our party.
> 
> As he had thus from the first shown so decided an aversion to bad
> company, I began to feel assured of his discretion, and by the end
> of the third day I had considerably relaxed my vigilance. This
> carelessness on my part, however, was soon punished, and I was made to
> regret my misplaced confidence. In an unguarded moment he listened to
> the voice of some four-footed syren, and the last I saw of him was the
> end of his bushy tail, vanishing round the corner of a dirty, winding
> little back street.
> 
> Greatly annoyed, I passed the remainder of the day in a vain search
> after my dumb companion. I offered twenty, thirty, forty francs reward
> for him. About as many vagabond Maltese began a regular chase, and
> towards evening we were invaded in our hotel by the whole troop, every
> man of them with a more or less mangy cur in his arms, which he tried
> to persuade me was my lost dog. The more I denied, the more solemnly
> they insisted, one of them actually going down on his knees, snatching
> from his bosom an old corroded metal image of the Virgin, and swearing
> a solemn oath that the Queen of Heaven herself had kindly appeared to
> him to point out the right animal. The tumult had increased to such
> an extent that it looked as if Ralph’s disappearance was going to be
> the cause of a small riot, and finally our landlord had to send for
> a couple of Kavasses from the nearest police station, and have this
> regiment of bipeds and quadrupeds expelled by main force. I began to
> be convinced that I should never see my dog again, and I was the
> more despondent since the porter of the hotel, a semi-respectable
> old brigand, who, to judge by appearances, had not passed more than
> half-a-dozen years at the galleys, gravely assured me that all my pains
> were useless, as my spaniel was undoubtedly dead and devoured too by
> this time, the Turkish dogs being very fond of their more toothsome
> English brothers.
> 
> All this discussion had taken place in the street at the door of the
> hotel, and I was about to give up the search for that night at least,
> and enter the hotel, when an old Greek lady, a Phanariote who had been
> hearing the fracas from the steps of a door close by, approached our
> disconsolate group and suggested to Miss H——, one of our party, that we
> should inquire of the dervishes concerning the fate of Ralph.
> 
> “And what can the dervishes know about my dog?” said I, in no mood to
> joke, ridiculous as the proposition appeared.
> 
> “The holy men know all, Kyrea (Madam),” said she, somewhat
> mysteriously. “Last week I was robbed of my new satin pelisse, that
> my son had just brought me from Broussa, and, as you all see, I have
> recovered it and have it on my back now.”
> 
> “Indeed? Then the holy men have also managed to metamorphose your new
> pelisse into an old one by all appearances,” said one of the gentlemen
> who accompanied us, pointing as he spoke to a large rent in the back,
> which had been clumsily repaired with pins.
> 
> “And that is just the most wonderful part of the whole story,” quietly
> answered the Phanariote, not in the least disconcerted. “They showed me
> in the shining circle the quarter of the town, the house, and even the
> room in which the Jew who had stolen my pelisse was just about to rip
> it up and cut it into pieces. My son and I had barely time to run over
> to the Kalindjikoulosek quarter, and to save my property. We caught the
> thief in the very act, and we both recognized him as the man shown to
> us by the dervishes in the magic moon. He confessed the theft and is
> now in prison.”
> 
> Although none of us had the least comprehension of what she meant
> by the magic moon and the shining circle, and were all thoroughly
> mystified by her account of the divining powers of the “holy men,” we
> still felt somehow satisfied from her manner that the story was not
> altogether a fabrication, and since she had at all events apparently
> succeeded in recovering her property through being somehow assisted by
> the dervishes, we determined to go the following morning and see for
> ourselves, for what had helped her might help us likewise.
> 
> The monotonous cry of the Muezzins from the tops of the minarets had
> just proclaimed the hour of noon as we, descending from the heights
> of Pera to the port of Galata, with difficulty managed to elbow our
> way through the unsavory crowds of the commercial quarter of the town.
> Before we reached the docks we had been half deafened by the shouts and
> incessant ear-piercing cries and the Babel-like confusion of tongues.
> In this part of the city it is useless to expect to be guided by either
> house numbers, or names of streets. The location of any desired place
> is indicated by its proximity to some other more conspicuous building,
> such as a mosque, bath or European shop; for the rest, one has to trust
> to Allah and his prophet.
> 
> It was with the greatest difficulty, therefore, that we finally
> discovered the British ship-chandler’s store, at the rear of which
> we were to find the place of our destination. Our hotel guide was as
> ignorant of the dervishes’ abode as we were ourselves; but at last a
> small Greek, in all the simplicity of primitive undress, consented for
> a modest copper backsheesh to lead us to the dancers.
> 
> When we arrived we were shown into a vast and gloomy hall that looked
> like a deserted stable. It was long and narrow, the floor was thickly
> strewn with sand as in a riding school, and it was lighted only by
> small windows placed at some height from the ground. The dervishes had
> finished their morning performances, and were evidently resting from
> their exhausting labors. They looked completely prostrated, some lying
> about in corners, others sitting on their heels staring vacantly into
> space, engaged, as we were informed, in meditation on their invisible
> deity. They appeared to have lost all power of sight and hearing, for
> none of them responded to our questions until a great gaunt figure,
> wearing a tall cap that made him look at least seven feet high, emerged
> from an obscure corner. Informing us that he was their chief, the giant
> gave us to understand that the saintly brethren, being in the habit of
> receiving orders for additional ceremonies from Allah himself, must
> on no account be disturbed. But when our interpreter had explained to
> him the object of our visit, which concerned himself alone, as he was
> the sole custodian of the “divining rod,” his objections vanished and
> he extended his hand for alms. Upon being gratified, he intimated that
> only two of our party could be admitted at one time into the confidence
> of the future, and led the way, followed by Miss H—— and myself.
> 
> Plunging after him into what seemed to be a half subterranean passage,
> we were led to the foot of a tall ladder leading to a chamber under
> the roof. We scrambled up after our guide, and at the top we found
> ourselves in a wretched garret of moderate size, with bare walls and
> destitute of furniture. The floor was carpeted with a thick layer of
> dust, and cobwebs festooned the walls in neglected confusion. In the
> corner we saw something that I at first mistook for a bundle of old
> rags; but the heap presently moved and got on its legs, advanced to the
> middle of the room and stood before us, the most extraordinary looking
> creature that I ever beheld. Its sex was female, but whether she was a
> woman or child it was impossible to decide. She was a hideous-looking
> dwarf, with an enormous head, the shoulders of a grenadier, with
> a waist in proportion; the whole supported by two short, lean,
> spider-like legs that seemed unequal to the task of bearing the weight
> of the monstrous body. She had a grinning countenance like the face of
> a satyr, and it was ornamented with letters and signs from the Koran
> painted in bright yellow. On her forehead was a blood-red crescent;
> her head was crowned with a dusty tarbouche, or fez; her legs were
> arrayed in large Turkish trousers, and some dirty white muslin wrapped
> round her body barely sufficed to conceal its hideous deformities. This
> creature rather let herself drop than sat down in the middle of the
> floor, and as her weight descended on the rickety boards it sent up a
> cloud of dust that set us coughing and sneezing. This was the famous
> Tatmos known as the Damascus oracle!
> 
> Without losing time in idle talk, the dervish produced a piece of
> chalk, and traced around the girl a circle about six feet in diameter.
> Fetching from behind the door twelve small copper lamps which he filled
> with some dark liquid from a small bottle which he drew from his bosom,
> he placed them symmetrically around the magic circle. He then broke a
> chip of wood from a panel of the half ruined door, which bore the marks
> of many a similar depredation, and, holding the chip between his thumb
> and finger he began blowing on it at regular intervals, alternating
> the blowing with mutterings of some kind of weird incantation, till
> suddenly, and without any apparent cause for its ignition, there
> appeared a spark on the chip and it blazed up like a dry match. The
> dervish then lit the twelve lamps at this self-generated flame.
> 
> During this process, Tatmos, who had sat till then altogether
> unconcerned and motionless, removed her yellow slippers from her naked
> feet, and throwing them into a corner, disclosed as an additional
> beauty, a sixth toe on each deformed foot. The dervish now reached over
> into the circle and seizing the dwarf’s ankles gave her a jerk, as if
> he had been lifting a bag of corn, and raised her clear off the ground,
> then, stepping back a pace, held her head downward. He shook her as
> one might a sack to pack its contents, the motion being regular and
> easy. He then swung her to and fro like a pendulum until the necessary
> momentum was acquired, when letting go one foot, and seizing the other
> with both hands, he made a powerful muscular effort and whirled her
> round in the air as if she had been an Indian club.
> 
> My companion had shrunk back in alarm to the farthest corner. Round
> and round the dervish swung his living burden, she remaining perfectly
> passive. The motion increased in rapidity until the eye could hardly
> follow the body in its circuit. This continued for perhaps two or three
> minutes, until, gradually slackening the motion, he at length stopped
> it altogether, and in an instant had landed the girl on her knees
> in the middle of the lamp-lit circle. Such was the Eastern mode of
> mesmerization as practised among the dervishes.
> 
> And now the dwarf seemed entirely oblivious of external objects and in
> a deep trance. Her head and jaw dropped on her chest, her eyes were
> glazed and staring, and altogether her appearance was even more hideous
> than before. The dervish then carefully closed the shutters of the only
> window, and we should have been in total obscurity, but that there was
> a hole bored in it, through which entered a bright ray of sunlight that
> shot through the darkened room and shone upon the girl. He arranged her
> drooping head so that the ray should fall upon the crown, after which
> motioning us to remain silent, he folded his arms upon his bosom, and,
> fixing his gaze upon the bright spot, became as motionless as a stone
> image. I, too, riveted my eyes on the same spot, wondering what was to
> happen next, and how all this strange ceremony was to help me to find
> Ralph.
> 
> By degrees, the bright patch, as if it had drawn through the sunbeam
> a greater splendor from without and condensed it within its own
> area, shaped itself into a brilliant star, sending out rays in every
> direction as from a focus.
> 
> A curious optical effect then occurred: the room, which had been
> previously partially lighted by the sunbeam, grew darker and darker as
> the star increased in radiance, until we found ourselves in an Egyptian
> gloom. The star twinkled, trembled and turned, at first with a slow
> gyratory motion, then faster and faster, increasing its circumference
> at every rotation until it formed a brilliant disk, and we no longer
> saw the dwarf, who seemed absorbed into its light. Having gradually
> attained an extremely rapid velocity, as the girl had done when whirled
> by the dervish, the motion began to decrease and finally merged into
> a feeble vibration, like the shimmer of moonbeams on rippling water.
> Then it flickered for a moment longer, emitted a few last flashes, and
> assuming the density and iridescence of an immense opal, it remained
> motionless. The disk now radiated a moon-like luster, soft and silvery,
> but instead of illuminating the garret, it seemed only to intensify
> the darkness. The edge of the circle was not penumbrous, but on the
> contrary sharply defined like that of a silver shield.
> 
> All being now ready, the dervish without uttering a word, or removing
> his gaze from the disk, stretched out a hand, and taking hold of mine,
> he drew me to his side and pointed to the luminous shield. Looking at
> the place indicated, we saw large patches appear like those on the
> moon. These gradually formed themselves into figures that began moving
> about in high relief in their natural colors. They neither appeared
> like a photograph nor an engraving; still less like the reflection of
> images on a mirror, but as if the disk were a cameo, and they were
> raised above its surface and then endowed with life and motion. To my
> astonishment and my friend’s consternation, we recognized the bridge
> leading from Galata to Stamboul spanning the Golden Horn from the new
> to the old city. There were the people hurrying to and fro, steamers
> and gay caiques gliding on the blue Bosphorus, the many colored
> buildings, villas and palaces reflected in the water; and the whole
> picture illuminated by the noon-day sun. It passed like a panorama,
> but so vivid was the impression that we could not tell whether it or
> ourselves were in motion. All was bustle and life, but not a sound
> broke the oppressive stillness. It was noiseless as a dream. It was
> a phantom picture. Street after street and quarter after quarter
> succeeded one another; there was the bazaar, with its narrow, roofed
> passages, the small shops on either side, the coffee houses with
> gravely smoking Turks; and as either they glided past us or we past
> them, one of the smokers upset the narghilé and coffee of another,
> and a volley of soundless invectives caused us great amusement. So
> we traveled with the picture until we came to a large building that I
> recognized as the palace of the Minister of Finance. In a ditch behind
> the house, and close to a mosque, lying in a pool of mud with his
> silken coat all bedraggled, lay my poor Ralph! Panting and crouching
> down as if exhausted, he seemed to be in a dying condition; and near
> him were gathered some sorry-looking curs who lay blinking in the sun
> and snapping at the flies!
> 
> I had seen all that I desired, although I had not breathed a word about
> the dog to the dervish, and had come more out of curiosity than with
> the idea of any success. I was impatient to leave at once and recover
> Ralph, but as my companion besought me to remain a little while longer,
> I reluctantly consented. The scene faded away and Miss H—— placed
> herself in turn by the side of the dervish.
> 
> “I will think of _him_,” she whispered in my ear with the eager tone
> that young ladies generally assume when talking of the worshipped _him_.
> 
> There is a long stretch of sand and a blue sea with white waves dancing
> in the sun, and a great steamer is ploughing her way along past a
> desolate shore, leaving a milky track behind her. The deck is full
> of life, the men are busy forward, the cook with white cap and apron
> is coming out of the galley, uniformed officers are moving about,
> passengers fill the quarter-deck, lounging, flirting or reading, and a
> young man we both recognize comes forward and leans over the taffrail.
> It is—_him_.
> 
> Miss H—— gives a little gasp, blushes and smiles, and concentrates her
> thoughts again. The picture of the steamer vanishes; the magic moon
> remains for a few moments blank. But new spots appear on its luminous
> face, we see a library slowly emerging from its depths—a library with
> green carpet and hangings, and book-shelves round the sides of the
> room. Seated in an arm-chair at a table under a hanging lamp, is an old
> gentleman writing. His gray hair is brushed back from his forehead,
> his face is smooth-shaven and his countenance has an expression of
> benignity.
> 
> The dervish made an hasty motion to enjoin silence; the light on the
> disk quivers, but resumes its steady brilliancy, and again its surface
> is imageless for a second.
> 
> We are back in Constantinople now and out of the pearly depths of the
> shield forms our own apartment in the hotel. There are our papers and
> books on the bureau, my friend’s traveling hat in a corner, her ribbons
> hanging on the glass, and lying on the bed the very dress she had
> changed when starting out on our expedition. No detail was lacking to
> make the identification complete; and as if to prove that we were not
> seeing something conjured up in our own imagination, there lay upon
> the dressing-table two unopened letters, the handwriting on which was
> clearly recognized by my friend. They were from a very dear relative
> of hers, from whom she had expected to hear when in Athens, but had
> been disappointed. The scene faded away and we now saw her brother’s
> room with himself lying upon the lounge, and a servant bathing his
> head, whence, to our horror, blood was trickling. We had left the boy
> in perfect health but an hour before; and upon seeing this picture my
> companion uttered a cry of alarm, and seizing me by the hand dragged
> me to the door. We rejoined our guide and friends in the long hall and
> hurried back to the hotel.
> 
> Young H—— had fallen downstairs and cut his forehead rather badly;
> in our room, on the dressing-table were the two letters which had
> arrived in our absence. They had been forwarded from Athens. Ordering
> a carriage, I at once drove to the Ministry of Finance, and alighting
> with the guide, hurriedly made for the ditch I had seen for the first
> time in the shining disk! In the middle of the pool, badly mangled,
> half-famished, but still alive, lay my beautiful spaniel Ralph, and
> near him were the blinking curs, unconcernedly snapping at the flies.
> 
> FROM THE POLAR LANDS
> 
> (A Christmas Story)
> 
> Just a year ago, during the Christmas holidays, a numerous society had
> gathered in the country house, or rather the old hereditary castle,
> of a wealthy landowner in Finland. Many were the remains in it of our
> forefathers’ hospitable way of living; and many the medieval customs
> preserved, founded on traditions and superstitions, semi-Finnish and
> semi-Russian, the latter imported into it by its female proprietors
> from the shores of the Neva. Christmas trees were being prepared and
> implements for divination were being made ready. For, in that old
> castle there were grim worm-eaten portraits of famous ancestors and
> knights and ladies, old deserted turrets, with bastions and Gothic
> windows; mysterious somber alleys, and dark and endless cellars, easily
> transformed into subterranean passages and caves, ghostly prison cells,
> haunted by the restless phantoms of the heroes of local legends. In
> short, the old Manor offered every commodity for romantic horrors. But
> alas! this once they serve for nought; in the present narrative these
> dear old horrors play no such part as they otherwise might.
> 
> Its chief hero is a very commonplace, prosaical man—let us call him
> Erkler. Yes; Dr. Erkler, professor of medicine, half-German through
> his father, a full-blown Russian on his mother’s side and by education;
> and one who looked a rather heavily built, and ordinary mortal.
> Nevertheless, very extraordinary things happened with him.
> 
> Erkler, as it turned out was a great traveler, who by his own choice
> had accompanied one of the most famous explorers on his journeys round
> the world. More than once they had both seen death face to face from
> sunstrokes under the Tropics, from cold in the Polar Regions. All this
> notwithstanding, the doctor spoke with a never-abating enthusiasm
> about their “winterings” in Greenland and Novaya Zemla, and about the
> desert plains in Australia, where he lunched off a kangaroo and dined
> off an emu, and almost perished of thirst during the passage through a
> waterless track, which it took them forty hours to cross.
> 
> “Yes,” he used to remark, “I have experienced almost everything, save
> what you would describe as _supernatural_.... This, of course if we
> throw out of account a certain extraordinary event in my life—a man
> I met, of whom I will tell you just now—and its ... indeed, rather
> strange, I may add quite _inexplicable_, results.”
> 
> There was a loud demand that he should explain himself; and the doctor,
> forced to yield, began his narrative.
> 
> “In 1878 we were compelled to winter on the north-western coast of
> Spitsbergen. We had been attempting to find our way during the short
> summer to the pole; but, as usual, the attempt had proved a failure,
> owing to the icebergs, and, after several such fruitless endeavors,
> we had to give it up. No sooner had we settled than the polar night
> descended upon us, our steamers got wedged in and frozen between the
> blocks of ice in the Gulf of Mussel, and we found ourselves cut off
> for eight long months from the rest of the living world.... I confess
> I, for one, felt it terribly at first. We became especially discouraged
> when one stormy night the snow hurricane scattered a mass of materials
> prepared for our winter buildings, and deprived us of over forty deer
> from our herd. Starvation in prospect is no incentive to good humor;
> and with the deer we had lost the best _plat de résistance_ against
> polar frosts, human organisms demanding in that climate an increase
> of heating and solid food. However, we were finally reconciled to
> our loss, and even got accustomed to the local and in reality more
> nutritious food—seals, and seal-grease. Our men from the remnants of
> our lumber built a house neatly divided into two compartments, one for
> our three professors and myself, and the other for themselves; and, a
> few wooden sheds being constructed for meteorological, astronomical
> and magnetic purposes, we even added a protecting stable for the few
> remaining deer. And then began the monotonous series of dawnless nights
> and days, hardly distinguishable one from the other, except through
> dark-gray shadows. At times, the “blues” we got into were fearful! We
> had contemplated sending two of our three steamers home in September,
> but the premature and unforeseen formation of ice walls round them had
> thwarted our plans; and now, with the entire crews on our hands, we had
> to economize still more with our meager provisions, fuel and light.
> Lamps were used only for scientific purposes: the rest of the time
> we had to content ourselves with God’s light—the moon and the Aurora
> Borealis.... But how describe these glorious, incomparable northern
> lights! Rings, arrows, gigantic conflagrations of accurately divided
> rays of the most vivid and varied colors. The November moonlight
> nights were as gorgeous. The play of moonbeams on the snow and the
> frozen rocks was most striking. These were fairy nights.
> 
> “Well, one such night—it may have been one such _day_, for all I know,
> as from the end of November to about the middle of March we had no
> twilights at all, to distinguish the one from the other—we suddenly
> espied in the play of colored beams, which were then throwing a golden
> rosy hue on the snow plains, a dark moving spot.... It grew, and seemed
> to scatter as it approached nearer to us. What did this mean?... It
> looked like a herd of cattle, or a group of living men, trotting over
> the snowy wilderness.... But animals there were white like everything
> else. What then was this?... human beings?...
> 
> “We could not believe our eyes. Yes, a group of men was approaching
> our dwelling. It turned out to be about fifty seal-hunters, guided by
> Matiliss, a well-known veteran mariner, from Norway. They had been
> caught by the icebergs, just as we had been.
> 
> “‘How did you know that we were here?’ we asked.
> 
> “‘Old Johan, this very same old party, showed us the way’—they
> answered, pointing to a venerable-looking old man with snow-white locks.
> 
> “In sober truth, it would have beseemed their guide far better to have
> sat at home over his fire than to have been seal-hunting in polar lands
> with younger men. And we told them so, still wondering how he came to
> learn of our presence in this kingdom of white bears. At this Matiliss
> and his companions smiled, assuring us that ‘old Johan’ _knew all_.
> They remarked that we must be novices in polar borderlands, since we
> were ignorant of Johan’s personality and could still wonder at anything
> said of him.
> 
> “‘It is nigh forty-five years,’ said the chief hunter, ‘that I have
> been catching seals in the Polar Seas, and as far as my personal
> remembrance goes, I have always known him, and just as he is now, an
> old, white-bearded man. And so far back as in the days when I used to
> go to sea, as a small boy with my father, my dad used to tell me the
> same of old Johan, and he added that his own father and grandfather
> too, had known Johan in their days of boyhood, none of them having ever
> seen him otherwise than white as our snows. And, as our forefathers
> nicknamed him “the white-haired all-knower,” thus do we, the seal
> hunters, call him, to this day.’
> 
> “‘Would you make us believe he is two hundred years old?’—we laughed.
> 
> “Some of our sailors crowding round the white-haired phenomenon, plied
> him with questions.
> 
> “‘Grandfather! answer us, how old are you?’
> 
> “‘I really do not know it myself, sonnies. I live as long as God has
> decreed me to. As to my years, I never counted them.’
> 
> “‘And how did you know, grandfather, that we were wintering in this
> place?’
> 
> “‘God guided me. How I learned it I do not know; save that I knew—I
> knew it.’”
> 
> THE ENSOULED VIOLIN
> 
> I
> 
> In the year 1828, an old German, a music teacher, came to Paris with
> his pupil and settled unostentatiously in one of the quiet faubourgs
> of the metropolis. The first rejoiced in the name of Samuel Klaus; the
> second answered to the more poetical appellation of Franz Stenio. The
> younger man was a violinist, gifted, as rumor went, with extraordinary,
> almost miraculous talent. Yet as he was poor and had not hitherto
> made a name for himself in Europe, he remained for several years in
> the capital of France—the heart and pulse of capricious continental
> fashion—unknown and unappreciated. Franz was a Styrian by birth, and,
> at the time of the event to be presently described, he was a young
> man considerably under thirty. A philosopher and a dreamer by nature,
> imbued with all the mystic oddities of true genius, he reminded one of
> some of the heroes in Hoffmann’s _Contes Fantastiques_. His earlier
> existence had been a very unusual, in fact, quite an eccentric one, and
> its history must be briefly told—for the better understanding of the
> present story.
> 
> Born of very pious country people, in a quiet burg among the Styrian
> Alps; nursed “by the native gnomes who watched over his cradle”;
> growing up in the weird atmosphere of the ghouls and vampires who play
> such a prominent part in the household of every Styrian and Slavonian
> in Southern Austria; educated later, as a student, in the shadow of
> the old Rhenish castles of Germany; Franz from his childhood had
> passed through every emotional stage on the plane of the so-called
> “supernatural.” He had also studied at one time the “occult arts” with
> an enthusiastic disciple of Paracelsus and Kunrath; alchemy had few
> theoretical secrets for him; and he had dabbled in “ceremonial magic”
> and “sorcery” with some Hungarian Tziganes. Yet he loved above all else
> music, and above music—his violin.
> 
> At the age of twenty-two he suddenly gave up his practical studies in
> the occult, and from that day, though as devoted as ever in thought
> to the beautiful Grecian Gods, he surrendered himself entirely to his
> art. Of his classic studies he had retained only that which related
> to the muses—Euterpe especially, at whose altar he worshipped—and
> Orpheus whose magic lyre he tried to emulate with his violin. Except
> his dreamy belief in the nymphs and the sirens, on account probably of
> the double relationship of the latter to the muses through Calliope and
> Orpheus, he was interested but little in the matters of this sublunary
> world. All his aspirations mounted, like incense, with the wave of the
> heavenly harmony that he drew from his instrument, to a higher and a
> nobler sphere. He dreamed awake, and lived a real though an enchanted
> life only during those hours when his magic bow carried him along the
> wave of sound to the Pagan Olympus, to the feet of Euterpe. A strange
> child he had ever been in his own home, where tales of magic and
> witchcraft grow out of every inch of the soil; a still stranger boy he
> had become, until finally he had blossomed into manhood, without one
> single characteristic of youth. Never had a fair face attracted his
> attention; not for one moment had his thoughts turned from his solitary
> studies to a life beyond that of a mystic Bohemian. Content with his
> own company, he had thus passed the best years of his youth and manhood
> with his violin for his chief idol, and with the Gods and Goddesses of
> old Greece for his audience, in perfect ignorance of practical life.
> His whole existence had been one long day of dreams, of melody and
> sunlight, and he had never felt any other aspirations.
> 
> How useless, but oh, how glorious those dreams! how vivid! and why
> should he desire any better fate? Was he not all that he wanted to
> be, transformed in a second of thought into one or another hero; from
> Orpheus, who held all nature breathless, to the urchin who piped away
> under the plane tree to the naiads of Callirrhoe’s crystal fountain?
> Did not the swift-footed nymphs frolic at his beck and call to the
> sound of the magic flute of the Arcadian Shepherd—who was himself?
> Behold, the Goddess of Love and Beauty herself descending from on high,
> attracted by the sweet-voiced notes of his violin!... Yet there came
> a time when he preferred Syrinx to Aphrodite—not as the fair nymph
> pursued by Pan, but after her transformation by the merciful Gods into
> the reed out of which the frustrated God of the Shepherds had made
> his magic pipe. For also, with time, ambition grows and is rarely
> satisfied. When he tried to emulate on his violin the enchanting sounds
> that resounded in his mind, the whole of Parnassus kept silent under
> the spell, or joined in heavenly chorus; but the audience he finally
> craved was composed of more than the Gods sung by Hesiod, verily of the
> most appreciative _mélomanes_ of European capitals. He felt jealous of
> the magic pipe, and would fain have had it at his command.
> 
> “Oh, that I could allure a nymph into my beloved violin!”—he often
> cried, after awakening from one of his day-dreams. “Oh, that I could
> only span in spirit flight the abyss of Time! Oh, that I could find
> myself for one short day a partaker of the secret arts of the Gods,
> a God myself, in the sight and hearing of enraptured humanity; and,
> having learned the mystery of the lyre of Orpheus, or secured within my
> violin a siren, thereby benefit mortals to my own glory!”
> 
> Thus, having for long years dreamed in the company of the Gods of his
> fancy, he now took to dreaming of the transitory glories of fame upon
> this earth. But at this time he was suddenly called home by his widowed
> mother from one of the German universities where he had lived for the
> last year or two. This was an event which brought his plans to an end,
> at least so far as the immediate future was concerned, for he had
> hitherto drawn upon her alone for his meager pittance, and his means
> were not sufficient for an independent life outside his native place.
> 
> His return had a very unexpected result. His mother, whose only love
> he was on earth, died soon after she had welcomed her Benjamin back;
> and the good wives of the burg exercised their swift tongues for many a
> month after as to the real causes of that death.
> 
> Frau Stenio, before Franz’s return, was a healthy, buxom, middle-aged
> body, strong and hearty. She was a pious and a God-fearing soul
> too, who had never failed in saying her prayers, nor had missed an
> early mass for years during his absence. On the first Sunday after
> her son had settled at home—a day that she had been longing for and
> had anticipated for months in joyous visions, in which she saw him
> kneeling by her side in the little church on the hill—she called him
> from the foot of the stairs. The hour had come when her pious dream was
> to be realized, and she was waiting for him, carefully wiping the dust
> from the prayer-book he had used in his boyhood. But instead of Franz,
> it was his violin that responded to her call, mixing its sonorous voice
> with the rather cracked tones of the peal of the merry Sunday bells.
> The fond mother was somewhat shocked at hearing the prayer-inspiring
> sounds drowned by the weird, fantastic notes of the “Dance of the
> Witches”; they seemed to her so unearthly and mocking. But she almost
> fainted upon hearing the definite refusal of her well-beloved son to
> go to church. He never went to church, he coolly remarked. It was loss
> of time; besides which, the loud peals of the old church organ jarred
> on his nerves. Nothing should induce him to submit to the torture of
> listening to that cracked organ. He was firm and nothing could move
> him. To her supplications and remonstrances he put an end by offering
> to play for her a “Hymn to the Sun” he had just composed.
> 
> From that memorable Sunday morning, Frau Stenio lost her usual serenity
> of mind. She hastened to lay her sorrows and seek for consolation at
> the foot of the confessional; but that which she heard in response
> from the stern priest filled her gentle and unsophisticated soul with
> dismay and almost with despair. A feeling of fear, a sense of profound
> terror, which soon became a chronic state with her, pursued her from
> that moment; her nights became disturbed and sleepless, her days passed
> in prayer and lamentations. In her maternal anxiety for the salvation
> of her beloved son’s soul, and for his _post mortem_ welfare, she made
> a series of rash vows. Finding that neither the Latin petition to the
> Mother of God written for her by her spiritual adviser, nor yet the
> humble supplications in German, addressed by herself to every saint
> she had reason to believe was residing in Paradise, worked the desired
> effect, she took to pilgrimages to distant shrines. During one of these
> journeys to a holy chapel situated high up in the mountains, she caught
> cold, amidst the glaciers of the Tyrol, and redescended only to take
> to a sick bed, from which she arose no more. Frau Stenio’s vow had led
> her, in one sense, to the desired result. The poor woman was now given
> an opportunity of seeking out in _propria persona_ the saints she had
> believed in so well, and of pleading face to face for the recreant son,
> who refused adherence to them and to the Church, scoffed at monk and
> confessional, and held the organ in such horror.
> 
> Franz sincerely lamented his mother’s death. Unaware of being the
> indirect cause of it, he felt no remorse; but selling the modest
> household goods and chattels, light in purse and heart, he resolved to
> travel on foot for a year or two, before settling down to any definite
> profession.
> 
> A hazy desire to see the great cities of Europe, and to try his luck
> in France, lurked at the bottom of this traveling project, but his
> Bohemian habits of life were too strong to be abruptly abandoned. He
> placed his small capital with a banker for a rainy day, and started
> on his pedestrian journey _via_ Germany and Austria. His violin paid
> for his board and lodging in the inns and farms on his way, and he
> passed his days in the green fields and in the solemn silent woods,
> face to face with Nature, dreaming all the time as usual with his eyes
> open. During the three months of his pleasant travels to and fro, he
> never descended for one moment from Parnassus; but, as an alchemist
> transmutes lead into gold, so he transformed everything on his way
> into a song of Hesiod or Anacreon. Every evening, while fiddling for
> his supper and bed, whether on a green lawn or in the hall of a rustic
> inn, his fancy changed the whole scene for him. Village swains and
> maidens became transfigured into Arcadian shepherds and nymphs. The
> sand-covered floor was now a green sward; the uncouth couples spinning
> round in a measured waltz with the wild grace of tamed bears became
> priests and priestesses of Terpsichore; the bulky, cherry-cheeked and
> blue-eyed daughters of rural Germany were the Hesperides circling
> around the trees laden with the golden apples. Nor did the melodious
> strains of the Arcadian demi-gods piping on their syrinxes, and audible
> but to his own enchanted ear, vanish with the dawn. For no sooner was
> the curtain of sleep raised from his eyes than he would sally forth
> into a new magic realm of day-dreams. On his way to some dark and
> solemn pine-forest, he played incessantly, to himself and to everything
> else. He fiddled to the green hill, and forthwith the mountain and the
> moss-covered rocks moved forward to hear him the better, as they had
> done at the sound of the Orphean lyre. He fiddled to the merry-voiced
> brook, to the hurrying river, and both slackened their speed and
> stopped their waves, and, becoming silent, seemed to listen to him in
> an entranced rapture. Even the long-legged stork who stood meditatively
> on one leg on the thatched top of the rustic mill, gravely resolving
> unto himself the problem of his too-long existence, sent out after
> him a long and strident cry, screeching, “Art thou Orpheus himself, O
> Stenio?”
> 
> It was a period of full bliss, of a daily and almost hourly exaltation.
> The last words of his dying mother, whispering to him of the horrors
> of eternal condemnation, had left him unaffected, and the only vision
> her warning evoked in him was that of Pluto. By a ready association of
> ideas, he saw the lord of the dark nether kingdom greeting him as he
> had greeted the husband of Eurydice before him. Charmed with the magic
> sounds of his violin, the wheel of Ixion was at a standstill once more,
> thus affording relief to the wretched seducer of Juno, and giving the
> lie to those who claim eternity for the duration of the punishment of
> condemned sinners. He perceived Tantalus forgetting his never-ceasing
> thirst, and smacking his lips as he drank in the heaven-born melody;
> the stone of Sisyphus becoming motionless, the Furies themselves
> smiling on him, and the sovereign of the gloomy regions delighted, and
> awarding preference to his violin over the lyre of Orpheus. Taken _au
> sérieux_, mythology thus seems a decided antidote to fear, in the face
> of theological threats, especially when strengthened with an insane and
> passionate love of music; with Franz, Euterpe proved always victorious
> in every contest, aye, even with Hell itself!
> 
> But there is an end to everything, and very soon Franz had to give up
> uninterrupted dreaming. He had reached the university town where dwelt
> his old violin teacher, Samuel Klaus. When this antiquated musician
> found that his beloved and favorite pupil, Franz, had been left poor
> in purse and still poorer in earthly affections, he felt his strong
> attachment to the boy awaken with tenfold force. He took Franz to his
> heart, and forthwith adopted him as his son.
> 
> The old teacher reminded people of one of those grotesque figures which
> look as if they had just stepped out of some medieval panel. And yet
> Klaus, with his fantastic _allures_ of a night-goblin, had the most
> loving heart, as tender as that of a woman, and the self-sacrificing
> nature of an old Christian martyr. When Franz had briefly narrated to
> him the history of his last few years, the professor took him by the
> hand, and leading him into his study simply said:
> 
> “Stop with me, and put an end to your Bohemian life. Make yourself
> famous. I am old and childless and will be your father. Let us live
> together and forget all save fame.”
> 
> And forthwith he offered to proceed with Franz to Paris, _via_ several
> large German cities, where they would stop to give concerts.
> 
> In a few days Klaus succeeded in making Franz forget his vagrant life
> and its artistic independence, and reawakened in his pupil his now
> dormant ambition and desire for worldly fame. Hitherto, since his
> mother’s death, he had been content to received applause only from the
> Gods and Goddesses who inhabited his vivid fancy; now he began to crave
> once more for the admiration of mortals. Under the clever and careful
> training of old Klaus his remarkable talent gained in strength and
> powerful charm with every day, and his reputation grew and expanded
> with every city and town wherein he made himself heard. His ambition
> was being rapidly realized; the presiding genii of various musical
> centers to whose patronage his talent was submitted soon proclaimed him
> _the one_ violinist of the day, and the public declared loudly that he
> stood unrivaled by any one whom they had ever heard. These laudations
> very soon made both master and pupil completely lose their heads.
> 
> But Paris was less ready with such appreciation. Paris makes
> reputations for itself, and will take none on faith. They had been
> living in it for almost three years, and were still climbing with
> difficulty the artist’s Calvary, when an event occurred which put
> an end even to their most modest expectations. The first arrival of
> Niccolo Paganini was suddenly heralded, and threw Lutetia into a
> convulsion of expectation. The unparalleled artist arrived, and—all
> Paris fell at once at his feet.
> 
> II
> 
> Now it is a well known fact that a superstition born in the dark days
> of medieval superstition, and surviving almost to the middle of the
> present century, attributed all such abnormal, out-of-the-way talent as
> that of Paganini to “supernatural” agency. Every great and marvelous
> artist had been accused in his day of dealings with the devil. A few
> instances will suffice to refresh the reader’s memory.
> 
> Tartini, the great composer and violinist of the seventeenth century,
> was denounced as one who got his best inspirations from the Evil One,
> with whom he was, it was said, in regular league. This accusation
> was, of course, due to the almost magical impression he produced upon
> his audiences. His inspired performance on the violin secured for him
> in his native country the title of “Master of Nations.” The _Sonate
> du Diable_, also called “Tartini’s Dream”—as everyone who has heard
> it will be ready to testify—is the most weird melody ever heard or
> invented: hence, the marvelous composition has become the source of
> endless legends. Nor were they entirely baseless, since it was he,
> himself, who was shown to have originated them. Tartini confessed to
> having written it on awakening from a dream, in which he had heard his
> sonata performed by Satan, for his benefit, and in consequence of a
> bargain made with his infernal majesty.
> 
> Several famous singers, even, whose exceptional voices struck the
> hearers with superstitious admiration, have not escaped a like
> accusation. Pasta’s splendid voice was attributed in her day to the
> fact that, three months before her birth, the diva’s mother was carried
> during a trance to heaven, and there treated to a vocal concert of
> seraphs. Malibran was indebted for her voice to St. Cecelia, while
> others said she owed it to a demon who watched over her cradle and sung
> the baby to sleep. Finally, Paganini—the unrivaled performer, the mean
> Italian, who like Dryden’s Jubal striking on the “chorded shell” forced
> the throngs that followed him to worship the divine sounds produced,
> and made people say that “less than a God could not dwell within the
> hollow of his violin”—Paganini left a legend too.
> 
> The almost supernatural art of the greatest violin player that the
> world has ever known was often speculated upon, never understood.
> The effect produced by him on his audience was literally marvelous,
> overpowering. The great Rossini is said to have wept like a sentimental
> German maiden on hearing him play for the first time. The Princess
> Elisa of Lucca, a sister of the great Napoleon, in whose service
> Paganini was, as director of her private orchestra, for a long time
> was unable to hear him play without fainting. In women he produced
> nervous fits and hysterics at his will; stout-hearted men he drove to
> frenzy. He changed cowards into heroes and made the bravest soldiers
> feel like so many nervous school-girls. Is it to be wondered at, then,
> that hundreds of weird tales circulated for long years about and
> around the mysterious Genoese, that modern Orpheus of Europe? One of
> these was especially ghastly. It was rumored, and was believed by more
> people than would probably like to confess it, that the strings of his
> violin were made of _human intestines, according to all the rules and
> requirements of the Black Art_.
> 
> Exaggerated as this idea may seem to some, it has nothing impossible in
> it; and it is more than probable that it was this legend that led to
> the extraordinary events which we are about to narrate. Human organs
> are often used by the Eastern Black Magician, so-called, and it is an
> averred fact that some Bengâlî Tântrikas (reciters of _tantras_, or
> “invocations to the demon,” as a reverend writer has described them)
> use human corpses, and certain internal and external organs pertaining
> to them, as powerful magical agents for bad purposes.
> 
> However this may be, now that the magnetic and mesmeric potencies
> of hypnotism are recognized as facts by most physicians, it may be
> suggested with less danger than heretofore that the extraordinary
> effects of Paganini’s violin-playing were not, perhaps, entirely due
> to his talent and genius. The wonder and awe he so easily excited were
> as much caused by his external appearance, “which had something weird
> and demoniacal in it,” according to certain of his biographers, as by
> the inexpressible charm of his execution and his remarkable mechanical
> skill. The latter is demonstrated by his perfect imitation of the
> flageolet, and his performance of long and magnificent melodies on the
> G string alone. In this performance, which many an artist has tried to
> copy without success, he remains unrivaled to this day.
> 
> It is owing to this remarkable appearance of his—termed by his
> friends eccentric, and by his too nervous victims, diabolical—that
> he experienced great difficulties in refuting certain ugly rumors.
> These were credited far more easily in his day than they would be
> now. It was whispered throughout Italy, and even in his own native
> town, that Paganini had murdered his wife, and, later on, a mistress,
> both of whom he had loved passionately, and both of whom he had not
> hesitated to sacrifice to his fiendish ambition. He had made himself
> proficient in magic arts, it was asserted, and had succeeded thereby
> in imprisoning the souls of his two victims in his violin—his famous
> Cremona.
> 
> It is maintained by the immediate friends of Ernst T. W. Hoffmann, the
> celebrated author of _Die Elixire des Teufels_, _Meister Martin_, and
> other charming and mystical tales, that Councillor Crespel, in the
> _Violin of Cremona_, was taken from the legend about Paganini. It is,
> as all who have read it know, the history of a celebrated violin, into
> which the voice and the soul of a famous diva, a woman whom Crespel had
> loved and killed, had passed, and to which was added the voice of his
> beloved daughter, Antonia.
> 
> Nor was this superstition utterly ungrounded, nor was Hoffmann to
> be blamed for adopting it, after he had heard Paganini’s playing.
> The extraordinary facility with which the artist drew out of his
> instrument, not only the most unearthly sounds, but positively human
> voices, justified the suspicion. Such effects might well have startled
> an audience and thrown terror into many a nervous heart. Add to this
> the impenetrable mystery connected with a certain period of Paganini’s
> youth, and the most wild tales about him must be found in a measure
> justifiable, and even excusable; especially among a nation whose
> ancestors knew the Borgias and the Medicis of Black Art fame.
> 
> III
> 
> In those pre-telegraphic days, newspapers were limited, and the wings
> of fame had a heavier flight than they have now. Franz had hardly heard
> of Paganini; and when he did, he swore he would rival, if not eclipse,
> the Genoese magician. Yes, he would either become the most famous of
> all living violinists, or he would break his instrument and put an end
> to his life at the same time.
> 
> Old Klaus rejoiced at such a determination. He rubbed his hands in
> glee, and jumping about on his lame leg like a crippled satyr, he
> flattered and incensed his pupil, believing himself all the while to be
> performing a sacred duty to the holy and majestic cause of art.
> 
> Upon first setting foot in Paris, three years before, Franz had
> all but failed. Musical critics pronounced him a rising star, but
> had all agreed that he required a few more years’ practice, before
> he could hope to carry his audiences by storm. Therefore, after a
> desperate study of over two years and uninterrupted preparations, the
> Styrian artist had finally made himself ready for his first serious
> appearance in the great Opera House where a public concert before
> the most exacting critics of the old world was to be held; at this
> critical moment Paganini’s arrival in the European metropolis placed
> an obstacle in the way of the realization of his hopes, and the old
> German professor wisely postponed his pupil’s _début_. At first he had
> simply smiled at the wild enthusiasm, the laudatory hymns sung about
> the Genoese violinist, and the almost superstitious awe with which his
> name was pronounced. But very soon Paganini’s name became a burning
> iron in the hearts of both the artists, and a threatening phantom in
> the mind of Klaus. A few days more, and they shuddered at the very
> mention of their great rival, whose success became with every night
> more unprecedented.
> 
> The first series of concerts was over, but neither Klaus nor Franz
> had as yet had an opportunity of hearing him and of judging for
> themselves. So great and so beyond their means was the charge for
> admission, and so small the hope of getting a free pass from a brother
> artist justly regarded as the meanest of men in monetary transactions,
> that they had to wait for a chance, as did so many others. But the day
> came when neither master nor pupil could control their impatience any
> longer; so they pawned their watches, and with the proceeds bought two
> modest seats.
> 
> Who can describe the enthusiasm, the triumphs, of this famous, and at
> the same time fatal night! The audience was frantic; men wept and women
> screamed and fainted; while both Klaus and Stenio sat looking paler
> than two ghosts. At the first touch of Paganini’s magic bow, both Franz
> and Samuel felt as if the icy hand of death had touched them. Carried
> away by an irresistible enthusiasm, which turned into a violent,
> unearthly mental torture, they dared neither look into each other’s
> faces, nor exchange one word during the whole performance.
> 
> At midnight, while the chosen delegates of the Musical Societies
> and the Conservatory of Paris unhitched the horses, and dragged the
> carriage of the grand artist home in triumph, the two Germans returned
> to their modest lodging, and it was a pitiful sight to see them.
> Mournful and desperate, they placed themselves in their usual seats at
> the fire-corner, and neither for a while opened his mouth.
> 
> “Samuel!” at last exclaimed Franz, pale as death itself. “Samuel—it
> remains for us now but to die!... Do you hear me?... We are worthless!
> We were two madmen to have ever hoped that any one in this world would
> ever rival ... him.”
> 
> The name of Paganini stuck in his throat, as in utter despair he fell
> into his arm chair.
> 
> The old professor’s wrinkles suddenly became purple. His little
> greenish eyes gleamed phosphorescently as, bending toward his pupil, he
> whispered to him in hoarse and broken tones:
> 
> “_Nein, Nein!_ Thou art wrong, my Franz! I have taught thee, and thou
> hast learned all of the great art that a simple mortal, and a Christian
> by baptism, can learn from another simple mortal. Am I to blame because
> these accursed Italians, in order to reign unequaled in the domain of
> art, have recourse to Satan and the diabolical effects of Black Magic?”
> 
> Franz turned his eyes upon his old master. There was a sinister light
> burning in those glittering orbs; a light telling plainly that, to
> secure such a power, he, too, would not scruple to sell himself, body
> and soul, to the Evil One.
> 
> But he said not a word, and, turning his eyes from his old master’s
> face, gazed dreamily at the dying embers.
> 
> The same long-forgotten incoherent dreams, which, after seeming such
> realities to him in his younger days, had been given up entirely, and
> had gradually faded from his mind, now crowded back into it with the
> same force and vividness as of old. The grimacing shades of Ixion,
> Sisyphus and Tantalus resurrected and stood before him, saying:
> 
> “What matters hell—in which thou believest not. And even if hell there
> be, it is the hell described by the old Greeks, not that of the modern
> bigots—a locality full of conscious shadows, to whom thou canst be a
> second Orpheus.”
> 
> Franz felt that he was going mad, and, turning instinctively, he
> looked his old master once more right in the face. Then his bloodshot
> eye evaded the gaze of Klaus.
> 
> Whether Samuel understood the terrible state of mind of his pupil,
> or whether he wanted to draw him out, to make him speak, and thus to
> divert his thoughts, must remain as hypothetical to the reader as
> it is to the writer. Whatever may have been in his mind, the German
> enthusiast went on, speaking with a feigned calmness:
> 
> “Franz, my dear boy, I tell you that the art of the accursed Italian
> is not natural; that it is due neither to study nor to genius. It
> never was acquired in the usual, natural way. You need not stare at
> me in that wild manner, for what I say is in the mouth of millions of
> people. Listen to what I now tell you, and try to understand. You have
> heard the strange tale whispered about the famous Tartini? He died one
> fine Sabbath night strangled by his familiar demon, who had taught
> him how to endow his violin with a human voice, by shutting up in it,
> by means of incantations, the soul of a young virgin. Paganini did
> more. In order to endow his instrument with the faculty of emitting
> human sounds, such as sobs, despairing cries, supplications, moans
> of love and fury—in short, the most heart-rending notes of the human
> voice—Paganini became the murderer not only of his wife and his
> mistress, but also of a friend, who was more tenderly attached to
> him than any other being on this earth. He then made the four chords
> of his magic violin out of the intestines of his last victim. This
> is the secret of his enchanting talent of that overpowering melody,
> that combination of sounds, which you will never be able to master
> unless....”
> 
> The old man could not finish his sentence. He staggered back before the
> fiendish look of his pupil, and covered his face with his hands.
> 
> Franz was breathing heavily, and his eyes had an expression which
> reminded Klaus of those of a hyena. His pallor was cadaverous. For some
> time he could not speak, but only gasp for breath. At last he slowly
> muttered:
> 
> “Are you in earnest?”
> 
> “I am, as I hope to help you.”
> 
> “And.... And do you really believe that had I only the means of
> obtaining human intestines for strings, I could rival Paganini?” asked
> Franz, after a moment’s pause, and casting down his eyes.
> 
> The old German unveiled his face, and, with a strange look of
> determination upon it, softly answered:
> 
> “Human intestines alone are not sufficient for our purpose; they must
> have belonged to some one who had loved us well, with an unselfish,
> holy love. Tartini endowed his violin with the life of a virgin; but
> that virgin had died of unrequited love for him. The fiendish artist
> had prepared beforehand a tube, in which he managed to catch her last
> breath as she expired, pronouncing his beloved name, and he then
> transferred this breath to his violin. As to Paganini, I have just told
> you his tale. It was with the consent of his victim, though, that he
> murdered him to get possession of his intestines.
> 
> “Oh, for the power of the human voice!” Samuel went on, after a brief
> pause. “What can equal the eloquence, the magic spell of the human
> voice? Do you think, my poor boy, I would not have taught you this
> great, this final secret, were it not that it throws one right into the
> clutches of him ... who must remain unnamed at night?” he added, with
> a sudden return to the superstitions of his youth.
> 
> Franz did not answer; but with a calmness awful to behold, he left his
> place, took down his violin from the wall where it was hanging, and,
> with one powerful grasp of the chords, he tore them out and flung them
> into the fire.
> 
> Samuel suppressed a cry of horror. The chords were hissing upon the
> coals, where, among the blazing logs, they wriggled and curled like so
> many living snakes.
> 
> “By the witches of Thessaly and the dark arts of Circe!” he exclaimed,
> with foaming mouth and his eyes burning like coals; “by the Furies of
> Hell and Pluto himself, I now swear, in thy presence, O Samuel, my
> master, never to touch a violin again until I can string it with four
> human chords. May I be accursed for ever and ever if I do!” He fell
> senseless on the floor, with a deep sob, that ended like a funeral
> wail; old Samuel lifted him up as he would have lifted a child, and
> carried him to his bed. Then he sallied forth in search of a physician.
> 
> IV
> 
> For several days after this painful scene Franz was very ill, ill
> almost beyond recovery. The physician declared him to be suffering
> from brain fever and said that the worst was to be feared. For nine
> long days the patient remained delirious; and Klaus, who was nursing
> him night and day with the solicitude of the tenderest mother, was
> horrified at the work of his own hands. For the first time since their
> acquaintance began, the old teacher, owing to the wild ravings of his
> pupil, was able to penetrate into the darkest corners of that weird,
> superstitious, cold, and, at the same time, passionate nature; and—he
> trembled at what he discovered. For he saw that which he had failed
> to perceive before—Franz as he was in reality, and not as he seemed
> to superficial observers. Music was the life of the young man, and
> adulation was the air he breathed, without which that life became a
> burden; from the chords of his violin alone, Stenio drew his life and
> being, but the applause of men and even of Gods was necessary to its
> support. He saw unveiled before his eyes a genuine, artistic, _earthly_
> soul, with its divine counterpart totally absent, a son of the Muses,
> all fancy and brain poetry, but without a heart. While listening to
> the ravings of that delirious and unhinged fancy Klaus felt as if
> he were for the first time in his long life exploring a marvelous
> and untraveled region, a human nature not of this world but of some
> incomplete planet. He saw all this, and shuddered. More than once he
> asked himself whether it would not be doing a kindness to his “boy” to
> let him die before he returned to consciousness.
> 
> But he loved his pupil too well to dwell for long on such an idea.
> Franz had bewitched his truly artistic nature, and now old Klaus felt
> as though their two lives were inseparably linked together. That he
> could thus feel was a revelation to the old man; so he decided to save
> Franz, even at the expense of his own old and, as he thought, useless
> life.
> 
> The seventh day of the illness brought on a most terrible crisis. For
> twenty-four hours the patient never closed his eyes, nor remained for a
> moment silent; he raved continuously during the whole time. His visions
> were peculiar, and he minutely described each. Fantastic, ghastly
> figures kept slowly swimming out of the penumbra of his small dark
> room, in regular and uninterrupted procession, and he greeted each by
> name as he might greet old acquaintances. He referred to himself as
> Prometheus, bound to the rock by four bands made of human intestines.
> At the foot of the Caucasian Mount the black waters of the river Styx
> were running.... They had deserted Arcadia, and were now endeavoring
> to encircle within a seven-fold embrace the rock upon which he was
> suffering....
> 
> “Wouldst thou know the name of the Promethean rock, old man?” he roared
> into his adopted father’s ear.... “Listen then, ... its name is ...
> called ... Samuel Klaus....”
> 
> “Yes, yes!...” the German murmured disconsolately. “It is I who killed
> him, while seeking to console. The news of Paganini’s magic arts struck
> his fancy too vividly.... Oh, my poor, poor boy!”
> 
> “Ha, ha, ha, ha!” The patient broke into a loud and discordant laugh.
> “Aye, poor old man, sayest thou?... So, so, thou art of poor stuff,
> anyhow, and wouldst look well only when stretched upon a fine Cremona
> violin!...”
> 
> Klaus shuddered, but said nothing. He only bent over the poor maniac,
> and with a kiss upon his brow, a caress as tender and as gentle as that
> of a doting mother, he left the sick-room for a few instants, to seek
> relief in his own garret. When he returned, the ravings were following
> another channel. Franz was singing, trying to imitate the sounds of a
> violin.
> 
> Toward the evening of that day, the delirium of the sick man became
> perfectly ghastly. He saw spirits of fire clutching at his violin.
> Their skeleton hands, from each finger of which grew a flaming claw,
> beckoned to old Samuel.... They approached and surrounded the old
> master, and were preparing to rip him open ... him “the only man on
> this earth who loves me with an unselfish, holy love, and ... whose
> intestines can be of any good at all!” he went on whispering, with
> glaring eyes and demon laugh....
> 
> By the next morning, however, the fever had disappeared, and by the end
> of the ninth day Stenio had left his bed, having no recollection of his
> illness, and no suspicion that he had allowed Klaus to read his inner
> thought. Nay; had he himself any knowledge that such a horrible idea as
> the sacrifice of his old master to his ambition had ever entered his
> mind? Hardly. The only immediate result of his fatal illness was, that
> as, by reason of his vow, his artistic passion could find no issue,
> another passion awoke, which might avail to feed his ambition and his
> insatiable fancy. He plunged headlong into the study of the Occult
> Arts, of Alchemy and of Magic. In the practice of Magic the young
> dreamer sought to stifle the voice of his passionate longing for his,
> as he thought, for ever lost violin....
> 
> Weeks and months passed away, and the conversation about Paganini
> was never resumed between the master and the pupil. But a profound
> melancholy had taken possession of Franz, the two hardly exchanged a
> word, the violin hung mute, chordless, full of dust, in its habitual
> place. It was as the presence of a soulless corpse between them.
> 
> The young man had become gloomy and sarcastic, even avoiding the
> mention of music. Once, as his old professor, after long hesitation,
> took out his own violin from its dust-covered case and prepared to
> play, Franz gave a convulsive shudder, but said nothing. At the first
> notes of the bow, however, he glared like a madman, and rushing out
> of the house, remained for hours, wandering in the streets. Then old
> Samuel in his turn threw his instrument down, and locked himself up in
> his room till the following morning.
> 
> One night as Franz sat, looking particularly pale and gloomy, old
> Samuel suddenly jumped from his seat, and after hopping about the room
> in a magpie fashion, approached his pupil, imprinted a fond kiss upon
> the young man’s brow, and squeaked at the top of his shrill voice:
> 
> “Is it not time to put an end to all this?”...
> 
> Whereupon, starting from his usual lethargy, Franz echoed, as in a
> dream:
> 
> “Yes, it is time to put an end to this.”
> 
> Upon which the two separated, and went to bed.
> 
> On the following morning, when Franz awoke, he was astonished not
> to see his old teacher in his usual place to greet him. But he had
> greatly altered during the last few months, and he at first paid no
> attention to his absence, unusual as it was. He dressed and went into
> the adjoining room, a little parlor where they had their meals, and
> which separated their two bedrooms. The fire had not been lighted since
> the embers had died out on the previous night, and no sign was anywhere
> visible of the professor’s busy hand in his usual housekeeping duties.
> Greatly puzzled, but in no way dismayed, Franz took his usual place
> at the corner of the now cold fire-place, and fell into an aimless
> reverie. As he stretched himself in his old arm-chair, raising both
> his hands to clasp them behind his head in a favorite posture of his,
> his hand came into contact with something on a shelf at his back; he
> knocked against a case, and brought it violently on the ground.
> 
> It was old Klaus’ violin-case that came down to the floor with such
> a sudden crash that the case opened and the violin fell out of it,
> rolling to the feet of Franz. And then the chords, striking against
> the brass fender emitted a sound, prolonged, sad and mournful as the
> sigh of an unrestful soul; it seemed to fill the whole room, and
> reverberated in the head and the very heart of the young man. The
> effect of that broken violin-string was magical.
> 
> “Samuel!” cried Stenio, with his eyes starting from their sockets,
> and an unknown terror suddenly taking possession of his whole being.
> “Samuel! what has happened?... My good, my dear old master!” he called
> out, hastening to the professor’s little room, and throwing the door
> violently open. No one answered, all was silent within.
> 
> He staggered back, frightened at the sound of his own voice, so changed
> and hoarse it seemed to him at this moment. No reply came in response
> to his call. Naught followed but a dead silence ... that stillness
> which, in the domain of sounds, usually denotes death. In the presence
> of a corpse, as in the lugubrious stillness of a tomb, such silence
> acquires a mysterious power, which strikes the sensitive soul with a
> nameless terror.... The little room was dark, and Franz hastened to
> open the shutters.
> 
>        *       *       *       *       *
> 
> Samuel was lying on his bed, cold, stiff, and lifeless.... At the sight
> of the corpse of him who had loved him so well, and had been to him
> more than a father, Franz experienced a dreadful revulsion of feeling,
> a terrible shock. But the ambition of the fanatical artist got the
> better of the despair of the man, and smothered the feelings of the
> latter in a few seconds.
> 
> A note bearing his own name was conspicuously placed upon a table near
> the corpse. With trembling hand, the violinist tore open the envelope,
> and read the following:
> 
>   MY BELOVED SON, FRANZ,
> 
>   When you read this, I shall have made the greatest sacrifice that
>   your best and only friend and teacher could have accomplished for
>   your fame. He, who loved you most, is now but an inanimate lump
>   of clay. Of your old teacher there now remains but a clod of cold
>   organic matter. I need not prompt you as to what you have to do
>   with it. Fear not stupid prejudices. It is for your future fame
>   that I have made an offering of my body, and you would be guilty
>   of the blackest ingratitude were you now to render useless this
>   sacrifice. When you shall have replaced the chords upon your
>   violin, and these chords a portion of my own self, under your
>   touch it will acquire the power of that accursed sorcerer, all the
>   magic voices of Paganini’s instrument. You will find therein my
>   voice, my sighs and groans, my song of welcome, the prayerful sobs
>   of my infinite and sorrowful sympathy, my love for you. And now,
>   my Franz, fear nobody! Take your instrument with you, and dog the
>   steps of him who filled our lives with bitterness and despair!...
>   Appear in every arena, where, hitherto, he has reigned without a
>   rival, and bravely throw the gauntlet of defiance in his face.
>   O Franz! then only wilt thou hear with what a magic power the
>   full notes of unselfish love will issue forth from thy violin.
>   Perchance, with a last caressing touch of its chords, thou wilt
>   remember that they once formed a portion of thine old teacher, who
>   now embraces and blesses thee for the last time.
> 
>         SAMUEL
> 
> Two burning tears sparkled in the eyes of Franz, but they dried up
> instantly. Under the fiery rush of passionate hope and pride, the two
> orbs of the future magician-artist, riveted to the ghastly face of the
> dead man, shone like the eyes of a demon.
> 
> Our pen refuses to describe that which took place on that day, after
> the legal inquiry was over. As another note, written with the view
> of satisfying the authorities, had been prudently provided by the
> loving care of the old teacher, the verdict was, “Suicide from causes
> unknown;” after this the coroner and the police retired, leaving the
> bereaved heir alone in the death-room, with the remains of that which
> had once been a living man.
> 
>        *       *       *       *       *
> 
> Scarcely a fortnight had elapsed from that day, ere the violin had been
> dusted, and four new, stout strings had been stretched upon it. Franz
> dared not look at them. He tried to play, but the bow trembled in his
> hand like a dagger in the grasp of a novice-brigand. He then determined
> not to try again, until the portentous night should arrive, when he
> should have a chance of rivaling, nay, of surpassing, Paganini.
> 
> The famous violinist had meanwhile left Paris, and was giving a series
> of triumphant concerts at an old Flemish town in Belgium.
> 
> V
> 
> One night, as Paganini, surrounded by a crowd of admirers, was sitting
> in the dining-room of the hotel at which he was staying, a visiting
> card, with a few words written on it in pencil, was handed to him by a
> young man with wild and staring eyes.
> 
> Fixing upon the intruder a look which few persons could bear, but
> receiving back a glance as calm and determined as his own, Paganini
> slightly bowed, and then dryly said:
> 
> “Sir, it shall be as you desire. Name the night. I am at your service.”
> 
> On the following morning the whole town was startled by the appearance
> of bills posted at the corner of every street, and bearing the strange
> notice:
> 
>   On the night of ... at the Grand Theater of ... and for the
>   first time, will appear before the public, Franz Stenio, a German
>   violinist, arrived purposely to throw down the gauntlet to the
>   world-famous Paganini and to challenge him to a duel—upon their
>   violins. He purposes to compete with the great “virtuoso” in the
>   execution of the most difficult of his compositions. The famous
>   Paganini has accepted the challenge. Franz Stenio will play, in
>   competition with the unrivaled violinist, the celebrated “Fantaisie
>   Caprice” of the latter, known as “The Witches.”
> 
> The effect of the notice was magical. Paganini, who, amid his greatest
> triumphs, never lost sight of a profitable speculation, doubled the
> usual price of admission, but still the theater could not hold the
> crowds that flocked to secure tickets for that memorable performance.
> 
>        *       *       *       *       *
> 
> At last the morning of the concert day dawned, and the “duel” was in
> everyone’s mouth. Franz Stenio, who, instead of sleeping, had passed
> the whole long hours of the preceding midnight in walking up and
> down his room like an encaged panther, had, toward morning, fallen
> on his bed from mere physical exhaustion. Gradually he passed into a
> death-like and dreamless slumber. At the gloomy winter dawn he awoke,
> but finding it too early to rise he fell to sleep again. And then he
> had a vivid dream—so vivid indeed, so life-like, that from its terrible
> realism he felt sure that it was a vision rather than a dream.
> 
> He had left his violin on a table by his bedside, locked in its case,
> the key of which never left him. Since he had strung it with those
> terrible chords he never let it out of his sight for a moment. In
> accordance with his resolution he had not touched it since his first
> trial, and his bow had never but once touched the human strings,
> for he had since always practised on another instrument. But now in
> his sleep he saw himself looking at the locked case. Something in
> it was attracting his attention, and he found himself incapable of
> detaching his eyes from it. Suddenly he saw the upper part of the case
> slowly rising, and, within the chink thus produced, he perceived two
> small, phosphorescent green eyes—eyes but too familiar to him—fixing
> themselves on his, lovingly, almost beseechingly. Then a thin, shrill
> voice, as if issuing from these ghastly orbs—the voice and orbs of
> Samuel Klaus himself—resounded in Stenio’s horrified ear, and he heard
> it say:
> 
> “Franz, my beloved boy.... Franz, I cannot, no, _I cannot_ separate
> myself from ... _them_!”
> 
> And “they” twanged piteously inside the case.
> 
> Franz stood speechless, horror-bound. He felt his blood actually
> freezing, and his hair moving and standing erect on his head....
> 
> “It’s but a dream, an empty dream!” he attempted to formulate in his
> mind.
> 
> “I have tried my best, Franzchen.... I have tried my best to sever
> myself from these accursed strings, without pulling them to pieces
> ...” pleaded the same shrill, familiar voice. “Wilt thou help me to do
> so?...”
> 
> Another twang, still more prolonged and dismal, resounded within the
> case, now dragged about the table in every direction, by some interior
> power, like some living wriggling thing, the twangs becoming sharper
> and more jerky with every new pull.
> 
> It was not for the first time that Stenio heard those sounds. He had
> often remarked them before—indeed, ever since he had used his master’s
> viscera as a footstool for his own ambition. But on every occasion a
> feeling of creeping horror had prevented him from investigating their
> cause, and he had tried to assure himself that the sounds were only a
> hallucination.
> 
> But now he stood face to face with the terrible fact, whether in dream
> or in reality he knew not, nor did he care, since the hallucination—if
> hallucination it were—was far more real and vivid than any reality.
> He tried to speak, to take a step forward; but, as often happens in
> nightmares, he could neither utter a word nor move a finger.... He felt
> hopelessly paralyzed.
> 
> The pulls and jerks were becoming more desperate with each moment, and
> at last something inside the case snapped violently. The vision of his
> Stradivarius, devoid of its magical strings, flashed before his eyes,
> throwing him into a cold sweat of mute and unspeakable terror.
> 
> He made a superhuman effort to rid himself of the incubus that held
> him spell-bound. But as the last supplicating whisper of the invisible
> Presence repeated:
> 
> “Do, oh, do ... help me to cut myself off——”
> 
> Franz sprang to the case with one bound, like an enraged tiger
> defending its prey, and with one frantic effort breaking the spell.
> 
> “Leave the violin alone, you old fiend from hell!” he cried, in hoarse
> and trembling tones.
> 
> He violently shut down the self-raising lid, and while firmly pressing
> his left hand on it, he seized with the right a piece of rosin from
> the table and he drew on the leathered-covered top the sign of the
> six-pointed star—the seal used by King Solomon to bottle up the
> rebellious djins inside their prisons.
> 
> A wail, like the howl of a she-wolf moaning over her dead little ones,
> came out of the violin-case:
> 
> “Thou art ungrateful ... very ungrateful, my Franz!” sobbed the
> blubbering “spirit-voice.” “But I forgive ... for I still love thee
> well. Yet thou canst not shut me in ... boy. Behold!”
> 
> [Illustration: “HE VIOLENTLY SHUT DOWN THE SELF-RAISING LID AND DREW ON
> THE LEATHER-COVERED TOP THE SIGN OF THE SIX-POINTED STAR, THE SEAL OF
> KING SOLOMON.”]
> 
> And instantly a grayish mist spread over and covered case and table,
> and rising upward formed itself first into an indistinct shape. Then it
> began growing, and as it grew, Franz felt himself gradually enfolded in
> cold and damp coils, slimy as those of a huge snake. He gave a terrible
> cry and—awoke; but, strangely enough, not on his bed, but near the
> table, just as he had dreamed, pressing the violin-case desperately
> with both his hands.
> 
> “It was but a dream, ... after all,” he muttered, still terrified, but
> relieved of the load on his heaving breast.
> 
> With a tremendous effort he composed himself, and unlocked the case to
> inspect the violin. He found it covered with dust, but otherwise sound
> and in order, and he suddenly felt himself as cool and determined as
> ever. Having dusted the instrument he carefully rosined the bow,
> tightened the strings and tuned them. He even went so far as to try
> upon it the first notes of the “Witches”; first cautiously and timidly,
> then using his bow boldly and with full force.
> 
> The sound of that loud, solitary note—defiant as the war trumpet of a
> conqueror, sweet and majestic as the touch of a seraph on his golden
> harp in the fancy of the faithful—thrilled through the very soul of
> Franz. It revealed to him a hitherto unsuspected potency in his bow,
> which ran on in strains that filled the room with the richest swell
> of melody, unheard by the artist until that night. Commencing in
> uninterrupted _legato_ tones, his bow sang to him of sun-bright hope
> and beauty, of moonlit nights, when the soft and balmy stillness
> endowed every blade of grass and all things animate and inanimate with
> a voice and a song of love. For a few brief moments it was a torrent of
> melody, the harmony of which, “tuned to soft woe,” was calculated to
> make mountains weep, had there been any in the room, and to soothe
> 
>     ... even th’ inexorable powers of hell,
> 
> the presence of which was undeniably felt in this modest hotel room.
> Suddenly, the solemn _legato_ chant, contrary to all laws of harmony,
> quivered, became _arpeggios_, and ended in shrill _staccatos_, like the
> notes of a hyena laugh. The same creeping sensation of terror, as he
> had before felt, came over him, and Franz threw the bow away. He had
> recognized the familiar laugh, and would have no more of it. Dressing,
> he locked the bedeviled violin securely in its case, and, taking it
> with him to the dining-room, determined to await quietly the hour of
> trial.
> 
> VI
> 
> The terrible hour of the struggle had come, and Stenio was at his
> post—calm, resolute, almost smiling.
> 
> The theater was crowded to suffocation, and there was not even standing
> room to be got for any amount of hard cash or favoritism. The singular
> challenge had reached every quarter to which the post could carry it,
> and gold flowed freely into Paganini’s unfathomable pockets, to an
> extent almost satisfying even to his insatiate and venal soul.
> 
> It was arranged that Paganini should begin. When he appeared upon
> the stage, the thick walls of the theater shook to their foundations
> with the applause that greeted him. He began and ended his famous
> composition “The Witches” amid a storm of cheers. The shouts of public
> enthusiasm lasted so long that Franz began to think his turn would
> never come. When, at last, Paganini, amid the roaring applause of a
> frantic public, was allowed to retire behind the scenes, his eye fell
> upon Stenio, who was tuning his violin, and he felt amazed at the
> serene calmness, the air of assurance, of the unknown German artist.
> 
> When Franz approached the footlights, he was received with icy
> coldness. But for all that, he did not feel in the least disconcerted.
> He looked very pale, but his thin white lips wore a scornful smile as
> response to this dumb unwelcome. He was sure of his triumph.
> 
> At the first notes of the prelude of “The Witches” a thrill of
> astonishment passed over the audience. It was Paganini’s touch, and—it
> was something more. Some—and they were the majority—thought that never,
> in his best moments of inspiration, had the Italian artist himself,
> in executing that diabolical composition of his, exhibited such an
> extraordinary diabolical power. Under the pressure of the long muscular
> fingers of Franz, the chords shivered like the palpitating intestines
> of a disemboweled victim under the vivisector’s knife. They moaned
> melodiously, like a dying child. The large blue eye of the artist,
> fixed with a satanic expression upon the sounding-board, seemed to
> summon forth Orpheus himself from the infernal regions, rather than the
> musical notes supposed to be generated in the depths of the violin.
> Sounds seemed to transform themselves into objective shapes, thickly
> and precipitately gathering as at the evocation of a mighty magician,
> and to be whirling around him, like a host of fantastic, infernal
> figures, dancing the witches’ “goat dance.” In the empty depths of
> the shadowy background of the stage, behind the artist, a nameless
> phantasmogoria, produced by the concussion of unearthly vibrations,
> seemed to form pictures of shameless orgies, of the voluptuous hymens
> of a real witches’ Sabbat.... A collective hallucination took hold
> of the public. Panting for breath, ghastly, and trickling with the
> icy perspiration of an inexpressible horror, they sat spell-bound,
> and unable to break the spell of the music by the slightest motion.
> They experienced all the illicit enervating delights of the paradise
> of Mahommed, that come into the disordered fancy of an opium-eating
> Mussulman, and felt at the same time the abject terror, the agony of
> one who struggles against an attack of _delirium tremens_.... Many
> ladies shrieked aloud, others fainted, and strong men gnashed their
> teeth in a state of utter helplessness.
> 
>        *       *       *       *       *
> 
> Then came the _finale_. Thundering uninterrupted applause delayed its
> beginning, expanding the momentary pause to a duration of almost a
> quarter of an hour. The bravos were furious, almost hysterical. At
> last, when after a profound and last bow, Stenio, whose smile was as
> sardonic as it was triumphant, lifted his bow to attack the famous
> _finale_, his eye fell upon Paganini, who, calmly seated in the
> manager’s box, had been behind none in zealous applause. The small
> and piercing black eyes of the Genoese artist were riveted to the
> Stradivarius in the hands of Franz, but otherwise he seemed quite cool
> and unconcerned. His rival’s face troubled him for one short instant,
> but he regained his self-possession and, lifting once more his bow,
> drew the first note.
> 
> Then the public enthusiasm reached its acme, and soon knew no bounds.
> The listeners heard and saw indeed. The witches’ voices resounded in
> the air, and beyond all the other voices, one voice was heard—
> 
>     Discordant, and unlike to human sounds;
>     It seem’d of dogs the bark, of wolves the howl;
>     The doleful screechings of the midnight owl;
>     The hiss of snakes, the hungry lion’s roar;
>     The sounds of billows beating on the shore;
>     The groan of winds among the leafy wood,
>     And burst of thunder from the rending cloud;—
>     ’Twas these, all these in one....
> 
> The magic bow was drawing forth its last quivering sounds—famous among
> prodigious musical feats—imitating the precipitate flight of the
> witches before bright dawn; of the unholy women saturated with the
> fumes of their nocturnal Saturnalia, when—a strange thing came to pass
> on the stage. Without the slightest transition, the notes suddenly
> changed. In their aerial flight of ascension and descent, their melody
> was unexpectedly altered in character. The sounds became confused,
> scattered, disconnected ... and then—it seemed from the sounding-board
> of the violin—came out squeaking, jarring tones, like those of a street
> Punch, screaming at the top of a senile voice:
> 
> “Art thou satisfied, Franz, my boy?... Have not I gloriously kept my
> promise, eh?”
> 
> The spell was broken. Though still unable to realize the whole
> situation, those who heard the voice and the _Punchinello_-like tones,
> were freed, as by enchantment, from the terrible charm under which
> they had been held. Loud roars of laughter, mocking exclamations of
> half-anger and half-irritation were now heard from every corner of the
> vast theater. The musicians in the orchestra, with faces still blanched
> from weird emotion, were now seen shaking with laughter, and the whole
> audience rose, like one man, from their seats, unable yet to solve the
> enigma; they felt, nevertheless, too disgusted, too disposed to laugh
> to remain one moment longer in the building.
> 
> But suddenly the sea of moving heads in the stalls and the pit
> became once more motionless, and stood petrified as though struck by
> lightning. What all saw was terrible enough—the handsome though wild
> face of the young artist suddenly aged, and his graceful, erect figure
> bent down, as though under the weight of years; but this was nothing
> to that which some of the most sensitive clearly perceived. Franz
> Stenio’s person was now entirely enveloped in a semi-transparent mist,
> cloud-like, creeping with serpentine motion, and gradually tightening
> round the living form, as though ready to engulf him. And there were
> those also who discerned in this tall and ominous pillar of smoke a
> clearly-defined figure, a form showing the unmistakable outlines of
> a grotesque and grinning, but terribly awful-looking old man, whose
> viscera were protruding and the ends of the intestines stretched on the
> violin.
> 
> Within this hazy, quivering veil, the violinist was then seen, driving
> his bow furiously across the human chords, with the contortions of a
> demoniac, as we see them represented on medieval cathedral paintings!
> 
> An indescribable panic swept over the audience, and breaking now,
> for the last time, through the spell which had again bound them
> motionless, every living creature in the theater made one mad rush
> towards the door. It was like the sudden outburst of a dam, a human
> torrent, roaring amid a shower of discordant notes, idiotic squeakings,
> prolonged and whining moans, cacophonous cries of frenzy, above which,
> like the detonations of pistol shots, was heard the consecutive
> bursting of the four strings stretched upon the sound-board of that
> bewitched violin.
> 
>        *       *       *       *       *
> 
> When the theater was emptied of the last man of the audience, the
> terrified manager rushed on the stage in search of the unfortunate
> performer. He was found dead and already stiff, behind the footlights,
> twisted up into the most unnatural of postures, with the “catguts”
> wound curiously around his neck, and his violin shattered into a
> thousand fragments....
> 
> When it became publicly known that the unfortunate would-be rival of
> Niccolo Paganini had not left a cent to pay for his funeral or his
> hotel-bill, the Genoese, his proverbial meanness notwithstanding,
> settled the hotel-bill and had poor Stenio buried at his own expense.
> 
> He claimed, however, in exchange, the fragments of the Stradivarius—as
> a momento of the strange event.
> 
> THE END
> 
> _There is no Religion Higher than Truth_
> 
> THE
> 
> UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD
> 
> AND
> 
> THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
> 
> _Established for the benefit of the people of the earth & all creatures_
> 
> OBJECTS
> 
> This BROTHERHOOD is part of a great and universal movement which has
> been active in all ages.
> 
> This Organization declares that Brotherhood is a fact. Its principal
> purpose is to teach Brotherhood, demonstrate that it is a fact in
> nature and make it a living power in the life of humanity.
> 
> Its subsidiary purpose is to study ancient and modern religions,
> science, philosophy and art; to investigate the laws of nature and the
> divine powers in man.
> 
>                      *       *
> 
> THE UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD AND THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, founded by H. P.
> Blavatsky in New York, 1875, continued after her death under the
> leadership of the co-founder, William Q. Judge, and now under the
> leadership of their successor, Katherine Tingley, has its Headquarters
> at the International Theosophical Center, Point Loma, California.
> 
> This Organization is not in any way connected with nor does it endorse
> any other societies using the name of Theosophy.
> 
>                      *       *
> 
> THE UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD AND THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY welcomes to
> membership all who truly love their fellow men and desire the
> eradication of the evils caused by the barriers of race, creed, caste
> or color, which have so long impeded human progress; to all sincere
> lovers of truth and to all who aspire to higher and better things than
> the mere pleasures and interests of a worldly life, and are prepared to
> do all in their power to make Brotherhood a living power in the life of
> humanity, its various departments offer unlimited opportunities.
> 
> The whole work of the Organization is under the direction of the Leader
> and Official Head, Katherine Tingley, as outlined in the Constitution.
> 
>        *       *       *       *       *
> 
> Do Not Fail to Profit by the Following
> 
> It is a regrettable fact that many people use the name of Theosophy and
> of our Organization for self-interest, as also that of H. P. Blavatsky,
> the Foundress, to attract attention to themselves and to gain public
> support. This they do in private and public speech and in publications,
> also by lecturing throughout the country. Without being in any way
> connected with THE UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD AND THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, in
> many cases they permit it to be inferred that they are, thus misleading
> the public, and many honest inquirers are hence led away from the
> truths of Theosophy as presented by H. P. Blavatsky and her successors,
> William Q. Judge and Katherine Tingley, and practically exemplified in
> their Theosophical work for the uplifting of humanity.
> 
> The International Brotherhood League
> 
> (Founded in 1897 by Katherine Tingley)
> 
> ITS OBJECTS ARE:
> 
> 1. To help men and women to realize the nobility of their calling and
> their true position in life.
> 
> 2. To educate children of all nations on the broadest lines of
> Universal Brotherhood; and to prepare destitute and homeless children
> to become workers for humanity.
> 
> 3. To ameliorate the condition of unfortunate women, and assist them to
> a higher life.
> 
> 4. To assist those who are, or have been in prisons, to establish
> themselves in honorable positions in life.
> 
> 5. To abolish capital punishment.
> 
> 6. To bring about a better understanding between so-called savage
> and civilized races, by promoting a closer and more sympathetic
> relationship between them.
> 
> 7. To relieve human suffering resulting from flood, famine, war, and
> other calamities; and, generally, to extend aid, help and comfort to
> suffering humanity throughout the world.
> 
> For further information regarding the above Notices, address
> 
>             KATHERINE TINGLEY
>   INTERNATIONAL THEOSOPHICAL HEADQUARTERS,
>                     POINT LOMA, CALIFORNIA
> 
> Books Recommended to Inquirers
> 
> For _complete_ BOOK LIST write to THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING CO.,
> Point Loma, California
> 
>   =Bhagavad Gita=; (W. Q. Judge, Am. Edition) pocket size,
>     Morocco, gilt edges                                  $1.00
>     Red leather                                            .75
>     _The pearl of the scriptures of the East._
> 
>   =Echoes from the Orient=; (W. Q. Judge) cloth            .50
>     Paper                                                  .25
>     _21 valued articles, giving a broad outline of
>     the Theosophical doctrines, written for the
>     newspaper-reading public._
> 
>   =Epitome of Theosophical Teachings, An=
>     (W. Q. Judge), 40 pages                                .15
> 
>   =Yoga Aphorisms= (translated by W. Q. Judge), pocket
>     size, leather                                          .75
> 
>   =Isis Unveiled=, by H. P. Blavatsky. 2 vols, royal 8vo,
>     about 1400 pages; cloth; with portrait of the author.
>     _New Point Loma Edition with a preface._ Postpaid    $7.00
> 
>   =Key to Theosophy, The=; (H. P. Blavatsky). _New Point
>     Loma Edition, with Glossary and exhaustive Index.
>     Portraits of H. P. Blavatsky and W. Q. Judge._ 8vo,
>     cloth, 400 pages. Postpaid                           $2.25
>     _A clear exposition of Theosophy in form of question
>     and answer. The book for students._
> 
>   =Nightmare Tales= (H. P. Blavatsky). _Illustrated by R.
>     Machell, R. A._ A collection of the weirdest tales ever
>     written down by any mortal. They contain paragraphs of
>     the profoundest mystical philosophy.
>     Cloth                                                  .60
>     Paper                                                  .35
> 
>   =Life at Point Loma, The=: Some notes by Katherine
>     Tingley, Leader and Official Head of the UNIVERSAL
>     BROTHERHOOD AND THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY                   .15
>     Reprinted from the _Los Angeles Post_, Dec., 1902.
> 
>   =Concentration, Culture of= (W. Q. Judge)                .15
> 
>   =Hypnotism: Theosophical views on= (40 pages)            .15
> 
>   =Light on the Path=; (M. C.) with comments,
>     Bound in black leather                                 .75
>     Embossed paper                                         .25
> 
>   =Mysteries of the Heart Doctrine, The.= Prepared by
>     KATHERINE TINGLEY and her pupils. Square, 8vo.
>     Cloth                                                $2.00
>     Paper                                                $1.25
>     A SERIES OF 8 PAMPHLETS comprising the Different
>     Articles in above; paper; each                         .25
> 
>   =Secret Doctrine, The.= The Synthesis of Science,
>     Religion, and Philosophy, by H. P. Blavatsky. _New
>     Point Loma Edition._ Two Vols. Royal 8vo., about 1500
>     pages; cloth. Postage prepaid                       $10.00
>     To be reprinted from the original edition of 1888, as
>     published by H. P. BLAVATSKY.
> 
>   =Katherine Tingley, Humanity’s friend:=
>     =A Visit to Katherine Tingley= (by John Hubert
>       Greusel);
>     =A Study of Râja Yoga at Point Loma= (Reprint from
>       the San Francisco _Chronicle_, January 6th, 1907).
>       The above three comprised in a pamphlet of 50 pages,
>       published by the Woman’s Theosophical Propaganda
>       League, Point Loma                                   .15
> 
> Occultism, Studies in
> 
>     (H. P. BLAVATSKY). Pocket size, 6 vols., cloth, per
>     set                                                  $1.50
> 
>   =Vol. 1.= Practical Occultism. Occultism _vs._ the
>     Occult Arts. The Blessing of Publicity                 .35
> 
>   =Vol. 2.= Hypnotism. Black Magic in Science, Signs of
>     the Times                                              .35
> 
>   =Vol. 3.= Psychic and Noetic Action                      .35
> 
>   =Vol. 4.= Kosmic Mind. Dual Aspect of Wisdom             .35
> 
>   =Vol. 5.= Esoteric Character of the Gospels              .35
> 
>   =Vol. 6.= Astral Bodies; Constitution of the Inner Man   .35
> 
> The Path Series
> 
> SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR INQUIRERS
> 
> _Already published:_
> 
>   =No. 1. The purpose of the Universal Brotherhood and
>     Theosophical Society=                                  .05
> 
>   =No. 2. Theosophy Generally Stated= (W. Q. Judge)        .05
> 
>   =No. 3. Mislaid Mysteries= (Herbert Coryn, M. D.)        .05
>       Thirty copies $1.00; one hundred copies $3.00
> 
>   =No. 4. Theosophy and Its Counterfeits=                  .05
>       Thirty copies $1.00; one hundred copies $3.00
> 
> Theosophical Manuals
> 
> ELEMENTARY HANDBOOKS FOR STUDENTS
> 
>   Cloth, Price each                                        .35
> 
>   No.  1. Elementary Theosophy.
>   No.  2. The Seven Principles of Man.
>   No.  3. Karma.
>   No.  4. Reincarnation.
>   No.  5. Man after Death.
>   No.  6. Kâmaloka and Devachan.
>   No.  7. Teachers and Their Disciples.
>   No.  8. The Doctrine of Cycles.
>   No.  9. Psychism, Ghostology, and the Astral Plane.
>   No. 10. The Astral Light.
>   No. 11. Psychometry, Clairvoyance, and Thought-Transference.
>   No. 12. The Angel and the Demon (2 vols., 35c. each)
>   No. 13. The Flame and the Clay.
>   No. 14. On God and Prayer.
>   No. 15. Theosophy: The Mother of Religions.
>   No. 16. From Crypt to Pronaos.
>             An Essay on the Rise and Fall of Dogma.
>   No. 17. Earth.
>             Its Parentage; its Rounds and its Races.
>   No. 18. Sons of the Firemist.
>             A Study of Man.
> 
> These Manuals contain some of the latest thought on the above technical
> subjects. Each volume is arranged to be complete in itself, though
> forming a necessary member of the series. It is intended to add others
> from time to time, to cover most of the technical aspects of Theosophy
> in a direct and simple way, thus forming a Theosophical library of
> inestimable value to inquirers. No one interested in Theosophy can
> afford to do without them.
> 
> Lotus Group Literature
> 
> LOTUS LIBRARY FOR CHILDREN
> 
> _Introduced under the direction of Katherine Tingley_
> 
>   =1. The Little Builders, and their Voyage to Rangi=
>     (R. N.)                                                .50
> 
>   =2. The Coming of the King= (Machell); cloth, gilt
>     edges                                                  .35
> 
>   =Lotus Song Book.= Fifty original songs with copyrighted
>     music; boards                                          .50
> 
>   =Lotus Song=—“_The Sun Temple_” with music               .15
> 
> New Century Series
> 
> _The Pith and Marrow of Some Sacred Writings._
> 
>   Ten Pamphlets, issued serially; Scripts, each            .25
> 
>   Subscription, for the set                              $1.50
> 
> _Already published:_
> 
>   =Script 1.= _Contents_: The Relation of Universal
>     Brotherhood to Christianity—No Man Can Serve Two
>     Masters—In this Place is a Greater Thing
> 
>   =Script 2.= _Contents_: A Vision of Judgment—The “Woes”
>     of the Prophets—The Great Victory—Fragment; from
>     Bhagavad Gita—Co-Heirs with Christ—Jesus the Man (the
>     only known personal description)
> 
>   =Script 3.= _Contents_: The Lesson of Israel’s
>     History—The Man Born Blind—Man’s Divinity and
>     Perfectibility—The Everlasting Covenant—The Burden of
>     the Lord
> 
>   =Script 4.= _Contents_: Reincarnation in the Bible—The
>     Mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven—The Temple of
>     God—The Heart Doctrine—The Money Changers in the Temple
> 
>   =Script 5.= _Contents_: Egypt and Prehistoric
>     America—Theoretical and Practical Theosophy—Death, One
>     of the Crowning Victories of Human Life—Reliance on the
>     Law—Led by the Spirit of God
> 
>   =Script 6.= _Contents_: Education Through Illusion
>     to Truth—Astronomy in the Light of Ancient
>     Wisdom—Occultism and Magic—Resurrection
> 
>   =Script 7.= _Contents_: Theosophy and Islam, a
>     word concerning Sufism—Archaeology in the light of
>     Theosophy—Man, a Spiritual Builder
> 
> THEOSOPHICAL PERIODICALS
> 
> CENTURY PATH
> 
> ILLUSTRATED WEEKLY
> 
> Edited by KATHERINE TINGLEY
> 
> A Magazine devoted to the Brotherhood of Humanity, the Promulgation
> of Theosophy and the Study of Ancient and Modern Ethics, Philosophy,
> Science and Art.
> 
>   Year $4.00                              Single Copy 10 Cents
> 
>   Write for a sample copy to
>             NEW CENTURY CORPORATION,
>                       Point Loma, California, U. S. A.
> 
>   =Râja Yoga Messenger.= _Illustrated._ Monthly. Yearly
>     subscription                                           .50
>       Unsectarian publication for Young Folk, conducted
>       by a staff of pupils of the Râja School at Lomaland
>   Address MASTER ALBERT G. SPALDING, Business Manager
>   =Râja Yoga Messenger=, Point Loma, California
> 
>   =International Theosophical Chronicle.= _Illustrated._
>     Monthly. Yearly subscription, postpaid               $1.00
>     The Theosophical Book Co., 18 Bartlett’s Buildings,
>     Holborn Circus, London, E. C.
> 
>   =Theosophia.= _Illustrated._ Monthly. Yearly
>     subscription postpaid                                 1.50
>     Universella Broderskapets Förlag, Barnhusgatan 10,
>     Stockholm 1, Sweden.
> 
>   =Universale Bruderschaft.= _Illustrated._ Monthly.
>     Yearly subscription, postpaid                         1.50
>     J. Th. Heller, ob. Turnstrasse 3, Nürnberg, Germany
> 
>   =Lotus-Knoppen.= _Illustrated._ Monthly. Yearly
>     subscription, postpaid                                 .75
>     A. Goud, Peperstraat, ingang Papengang, No. 14,
>     Groningen, Holland
> 
> Subscriptions to the above four Magazines may be secured also through
> _The Theosophical Publishing Company_, Point Loma, California
> 
>   _Neither the editors of the above publications, nor the officers
>     of the_ UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD AND THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, _or of
>     any of its departments, receive salaries or other remuneration_.
> 
>   _All profits arising from the business of the Theosophical
>     Publishing Co. are devoted to Humanitarian Work. All who assist
>     in this work are directly helping the great cause of Humanity._
> 
> Transcriber’s note
> 
> The following corrections have been made, on page
> 
> 7 “situa-ation” changed to “situation” (a clearer comprehension of the
> situation)
> 
> 13 ” added (perish in the Ocean of Mâyâ.”)
> 
> 14 “sanctury” changed to “sanctuary” (had only peeped into the
> sanctuary)
> 
> 16 “sancity” changed to “sanctity” (purity and sanctity of their lives)
> 
> 67 “proceded” changed to “proceeded” (I proceeded without delay)
> 
> 68 “wierdness” changed to “weirdness” (are heard in all their weirdness)
> 
> 72 “unaccoutably” changed to “unaccountably” (had so unaccountably
> disappeared ten years before)
> 
> 97 “unforseen” changed to “unforeseen” (the premature and unforeseen
> formation)
> 
> 112 “unparalled” changed to “unparalleled” (The unparalleled artist
> arrived)
> 
> 133 “the the” changed to “the” (he carefully rosined the bow)
> 
> 142 “in in” changed to “in” (in many cases they permit).
> 
> Otherwise the original has been preserved, including unusual and
> inconsistent spelling, hyphenation and capitalisation.
>
> — *Nightmare Tales (Public Domain (Project Gutenberg))*