itas and the Stone. Like Scythrop, in 'Nightmare Abbey,' he had for a
long period slept with horrid mysteries beneath his pillow. But suddenly
his interest had faded: these phantoms fled before a rationalistic
cock-crow, and Eugenius Philalethes and Robert Fludd went with Mejnour
and Zanoni into a twilight forgetfulness. There was no hand to show the
hidden way to the land that might be, and there were hands beckoning and
voices calling him along the highway to the land that is. So,
dream-light passing, he must, perforce, reconcile himself to daylight,
with its dusty beam and its narrow horizons.

Judge, then, with what a leaping heart he chanced on some newspaper
gossip concerning the sibyl, for it was so that he first stumbled across
her mission. Ironical, indeed, that the so impossible 'key' to the
mystery should come by the hand of 'our own correspondent'; but so it
was, and that paragraph sold no small quantity of 'occult' literature
for the next twelve months. Mr. Sinnett, doorkeeper in the house of
Blavatsky, who, as a precaution against the vision of Bluebeards that
the word Oriental is apt to conjure up in Western minds, is always
dressed in the latest mode, and, so to say, offers his cigar-case along
with some horrid mystery--it was to his prospectus of the new gospel,
his really delightful pages, that Narcissus first applied. Then he
entered within the gloomier Egyptian portals of the _Isis_ itself, and
from thence--well, in brief, he went in for a course of Redway, and
little that figured in that gentleman's thrilling announcements was long
in reaching his hands.

At last a day came when his eye fell upon a notice, couched in suitably
mysterious terms, to the effect that really earnest seekers after divine
truth might, after necessary probation, etc., join a brotherhood of
such--which, it was darkly hinted, could give more than it dared
promise. Up to this point Narcissus had been indecisive. He was,
remember, quite in earnest, and to actually accept this new evangel
meant to him--well, as he said, nothing less in the end than the
Himalayas. Pending his decision, however, he had gradually developed a
certain austerity, and experimented in vegetarianism; and though he was,
oddly enough, free of amorous bond that might have held him to earth,
yet he had grown to love it rather rootedly since the earlier days when
he was a 'seeker.' Moreover, though he read much of 'The Path,' no
actual Mejnour had yet been re