, who are there comfortably settled
in life, enjoying many modern conveniences. It produces poisons which
usually cause death by cerebral hemorrhage; but each has its special
antidote, possessed of which the initiated poisoner can eat and drink
with his victim; on this subject the doctor pursues, however, a policy
of masterly reticence. But such, in brief, is the deep mystery of
Gibraltar, such is the Toxicological department of universal
Freemasonry.

Sec. 10. _The Doctor and Diana._

It would be impossible to follow the doctor through the entire course of
his memoirs, not that they are wholly biographical, exclusively
concerned with modern diabolism, or with the great conspiracy of Masons
against God, Man, and the universe; one of his subsidiary and yet most
important objects is to fill space, in which respect he has almost
eclipsed the great classics of the penny dreadful in England. I must
pass with a mere reference over his dealings in spiritualism; it is
needless to say that in this branch of transcendental investigation he
witnessed more astounding phenomena than falls commonly to the lot of
even veteran students. His star prevailed everywhere, and the world
unseen deployed its strongest forces. At Monte Video, for example,
falling casually into a circle of spiritualists, he was seated,
surrounded by a family of these unconscious and amateur diabolists,
before an open window at night time; across the broad mouth of the river
a great shaft of soft light from the lamp of the lighthouse opposite
shone in mid-air, over the bosom of the water, and as it fell upon their
faces he discerned, floating within the beam itself, the solid figure of
a man. It was not the first time that the apparition, under similar
circumstances, had been seen by the rest of the household, but for him
it bore a message of deeper mystery than for these uninitiated
spiritualists; although in man's clothes, his observant eye recognised
the face of the spirit; terrible and suggestive truth, it was the face
of the vestal Virgin, who, far off in Calcutta, had fluidified in the
third temple, and he uttered a great cry! He has now decided to void
the virginity of the vestal, and to assume that she was in reality a
demon, and not a being of earth. At the same time, my readers must
thoroughly understand that the doctor, when he meddles in spiritualism,
is a man who is governed in his narratives by an intelligent faculty of
criticism which borders o