the Astrolabe," which I had never read before,
but devoured then as greedily as no doubt did "Little Lowis," to whom it
is addressed. All this tended to put me in a proper frame of mind for my
visit to Newington; so, after an early tea, we took my friend's figure
of his nativity with us, and went.

Professor Smith, we found, lived in a cosy house in the main road, the
parlours whereof he devoted to the purposes of a medical magnetist,
which was his calling, as inscribed upon the wire blinds of the ground
floor front. We were ushered at once into the professor's presence by a
woman who, I presume, was his wife--a quiet respectable body with
nothing uncanny about her. The front parlour was comfortably furnished
and scrupulously clean, and the celebrated Professor himself, a pleasant
elderly gentleman, was sitting over a manuscript which he read by the
light of a Queen's reading lamp. There was not, on the one hand, any
charlatan assumption in his get-up, nor, on the other, was there that
squalor and neglect of the decencies of life which I have heard
sometimes attaches to the practitioners in occult science. Clad in a
light over-coat, with spectacles on nose, and bending over his MS.,
Professor Smith might have been a dissenting parson en deshabille
"getting off" his Sunday discourse, or a village schoolmaster correcting
the "themes" of his pupils. He was neither; he was a nineteenth century
astrologer, calculating the probabilities of success for a commercial
scheme, the draft prospectus of which was the document over which he
pored. As he rose to receive us I was almost disappointed to find that
he held no wand, wore no robe, and had no volume of mystic lore by his
side. The very cat that emerged from underneath his table, and rubbed
itself against my legs was not of the orthodox sable hue, but simple
tabby and white.

My friend opened the proceedings by producing the figure of his
nativity, and saying he had come to ask a question in horary astrology
relative to a certain scheme about which he was anxious, such anxiety
constituting what he termed a "birth of the mind." Of course this was
Dutch to me, and I watched to see whether the Professor would be taken
off his guard by finding he was in presence of one thoroughly posted up
in astral science. Not in the least; he greeted him as a brother chip,
and straightway the two fell to discussing the figure. The Professor
worked a new one, which he found to differ in some s