My Library

others, that of an inhabitant of the aëreal spaces, who, thus embodied, roamed the earth at will. He, when closely questioned, declared his firm belief that he had lived down through many ages, and that for reasons known to himself, he was doomed to live on, like the great Artefius—that other Rosicrucian—until a certain consummated act (wherein he was to be involuntarily an active party) should release him from it and permit him to share the lot of other men. As a consequence of his dissimilarity from others he appeared to have been endowed with certain hyper-mental powers, among which was a strange intro-vision, not the fraudulent clairvoyance claimed and palmed off upon the world by the arch impostor of Poughkeepsie, and others of the same kidney, but something analogous to that attributed to the oraclepriestesses of Delphos and Delos. This power, which was not always present, enabled him to behold and describe things, persons and events, even across the widest gulfs of ocean; and to read the secret history and thoughts of the most secretive, self-possessed and subtle-minded man as easily as if it were a printed scroll. When this ecstasy was on him he looked as if, at that moment, he beheld things forever sealed from the majority of eyes, and that too both with and without his wonderful magic mirror. At first I doubted his pretensions, mentally referred them