ally
enough by a burst of tears, and the terrific information that he was
damned. But the Carbuccia of old was a riotous, joyful, foul-tongued,
pleasure-loving atheist, a typical commercial traveller, with a strain
of Alsatia and the mountain-brigand. How came this red-tied scoffer so
far on the road of religion as to be damned? Some foolish fancy had made
the ribald Gaetano turn a Mason. When one of his boon companions had
suggested the evil course, he had refused blankly, apparently because he
was asked, rather than because it was evil; but he had scarcely regained
his home in Naples than he became irreparably initiated. The ceremony
was accomplished in a street of that city by a certain Giambattista
Pessina, who was a Most Illustrious Sovereign Grand Commander, Past
Grand Master, and Grand Hierophant of the Antique and Oriental Rite of
Memphis and Misraim, who, for some reason which escapes analysis,
recognised Carbuccia as a person who deserved to be acquainted with the
whole physiology and anatomy of Masonry. It would cost 200 francs to
enter the 33rd grade of the sublime mystery. Carbuccia closed with this
offer, and was initiated there and then across the table, becoming a
Grand Commander of the Temple, and was affiliated, for a further
subscription of 15 francs annually, to the Areopagite of Naples,
receiving the passwords regularly.

Impelled by an enthusiasm for which he himself was unable to account, he
now lent a ready ear to all dispensers of degrees; Memphis initiates of
Manchester allured him into Kabbalistic rites; he fell among occult
Masons like the Samaritan among thieves; he became a Sublime Hermetic
Philosopher; overwhelmed with solicitations, he fraternised with the
Brethren of the New Reformed Palladium, and optimated with the Society
of Re-Theurgists, from whom he ultimately received the veritable
initiation of the Magi. Everywhere lodges opened to him, everywhere
mysteries unveiled; everywhere in the higher grades he found spiritism,
magic, evocation; his atheism became impossible, and his conscience
troubled.

Ultimately his business led him to revisit Calcutta, where his last
unheard-of experience had overwhelmed his whole being, just eight days
previously to his encounter with Doctor Bataille. He had found the
Palladists of that city in a flutter of feverish excitement because they
had succeeded in obtaining from China the skulls of three martyred
missionaries. These treasures were indispen