SITTING WITH A SIBYL 347

XLV. SPIRITUALISTS AND CONJURERS 355

XLVI. PROS AND CONS OF SPIRITUALISM 362

INTRODUCTION.

It is perhaps scarcely necessary to say that I use the term Mystic, as
applied to the larger portion of this volume, in its technical sense to
signify my own _initiation_ into some of the more occult phases of
metropolitan existence. It is only to the Spiritualistic, or concluding
portion of my work, that the word applies in its ordinary signification.

C. M. D.

MYSTIC LONDON.

CHAPTER I.

LONDON ARABS.

Of all the protean forms of misery that meet us in the bosom of that
"stony-hearted stepmother, London," there is none that appeals so
directly to our sympathies as the spectacle of a destitute child. In the
case of the grown man or woman, sorrow and suffering are often traceable
to the faults, or at best to the misfortunes of the sufferers
themselves; but in the case of the child they are mostly, if not always,
vicarious. The fault, or desertion, or death of the natural protectors,
turns loose upon the desert of our streets those nomade hordes of
Bedouins, male and female, whose presence is being made especially
palpable just now, and whose reclamation is a perplexing, yet still a
hopeful problem. In the case of the adult Arab, there is a life's work
to undo, and the facing of that fact it is which makes some of our
bravest workers drop their hands in despair. With these young Arabs, on
the contrary, it is only the wrong bias of a few early years to
correct, leaving carte blanche for any amount of hope in youth,
maturity, and old age. Being desirous of forming, for my own
edification, some notion of the amount of the evil existing, and the
efforts made to counteract it, I planned a pilgrimage into this Arabia
Infelix--this Petraea of the London flagstones; and purpose setting down
here, in brief, a few of my experiences, for the information of
stay-at-home travellers, and still more for the sake of pointing out to
such as may be disposed to aid in the work of rescuing these little
Arabs the proper channels for their beneficence. Selecting, then, the
Seven Dials and Bethnal Green as the foci of my observation in West and
East London respectively, I set out for the former one bleak March
night, and by way of breaking ground, applied to the first
police-constable I met on that undesirable