How does it happen that the mediaeval saint, the
Indian medicine-man, the Siberian shaman (a suggestive term), have nearly
identical wonders attributed to them? If people wanted merely to tell "a
good square lie," as the American slang has it, invention does not seem
to have such pitifully narrow boundaries. It appears to follow that
there are contagious nervous illusions, about which science has not said
the last word. We believe that the life of children, with its innocent
mixture of dreams and waking, facts and fancies, could supply odd
parallels to the stories we have been treated to. And as we are on the
subject, we should like, as the late President Lincoln said, to tell a
little story. It occurred to a learned divine to meet a pupil, who ought
by rights to have been in the University of Oxford, walking in Regent
Street. The youth glided past like a ghost, and was lost in the crowd;
next day his puzzled preceptor received a note, dated on the previous day
from Oxford, telling how the pupil had met the teacher by the Isis, and
on inquiry had heard he was in London. Here is a case of levitation--of
double levitation, and we leave it to be explained by the followers of
Abaris and of Mr. Home.

A CHINAMAN'S MARRIAGE.

The Court of Assizes at Paris has lately been occupied with the case of a
Chinese gentleman, whose personal charms and literary powers make him
worthy to be the compatriot of Ah-Sin, that astute Celestial. Tin-tun-
ling is the name--we wish we could say, with Thackeray's F. B., "the
highly respectable name"--of the Chinese who has just been acquitted on a
charge of bigamy. In China, it is said that the more distinguished a man
is the shorter is his title, and the name of a very victorious general is
a mere click or gasp. On this principle, the trisyllabic Tin-tun-ling
must have been without much honour in his own country. In Paris,
however, he has learned Parisian aplomb, and when confronted with his
judges and his accusers, his air, we learn, "was very calm." "His smile
it was pensive and bland," like the Heathen Chinee's, and his calm
confidence was justified by events. It remains to tell the short, though
not very simple, tale of Tin-tun-ling. Mr. Ling was born in 1831, in the
province of Chan-li. At the interesting age of eighteen, an age at which
the intellect awakens and old prejudices lose their grasp, he ceased to
burn gilt paper on the tombs of his ancestors; he ceased to re