her or esoteric meaning to "piggy,"
which was also known to the _dames du temps jadis_, to Archipiada and
Thais, _qui fut la belle Romaine_,--and this inner meaning makes of it a
type of birth or creation. Now all that symbolizes fertility, birth,
pleasure, warmth, light, and love is opposed to barrenness, cold, death,
and evil; whence it follows that the very sight of a shell, and
especially of a cowrie, frightens away the devils as well as a
horse-shoe, which by the way has also its cryptic meaning. Hence it was
selected to cast for luck, a world-old custom, which still lingers in the
game of props; and for the same reason it is hung on donkeys, the devil
being still scared away by the sight of a cowrie, even as he was scared
away of old by its prototype, as told by Rabelais.

As the sibyls sat in caves, so the sorceress sat in the dark archway,
immovable when not sought, mysterious as are all her kind, and something
to wonder at. It was after passing her, and feeling by quick intuition
what she was, that the court-yard became a fairy-land, and the fountain
its poet, and the palm-trees Tamar maids. There are people who believe
there is no mystery, that an analysis of the gypsy sorceress would have
shown an ignorant outcast; but while nature gives chiaro-oscuro and
beauty, and while God is the Unknown, I believe that the more light there
is cast by science the more stupendous will be the new abysses of
darkness revealed. These natures must be taken with the _life_ in them,
not dead,--and their life is mystery. The Hungarian gypsy lives in an
intense mystery, yes, in true magic in his singing. You may say that he
cannot, like Orpheus, move rocks or tame beasts with his music. If he
could he could do no more than astonish and move us, and he does that
now, and the _why_ is as deep a mystery as that would be.

So far is it from being only a degrading superstition in those who
believe that mortals like themselves can predict the future, that it
seems, on the contrary ennobling. It is precisely because man feels a
mystery within himself that he admits it may be higher in others; if
spirits whisper to him in dreams and airy passages of trembling light, or
in the music never heard but ever felt below, what may not be revealed to
others? You may tell me if you will that prophecies are all rubbish and
magic a lie, and it may be so,--nay, _is_ so, but the awful mystery of
the Unknown without a name and the yearning to