osities of literature. This is
the precious document which appears over the signatures of Alexander
Graveson and Diana Vaughan, after which I submit to my readers that
Signor Domenico Margiotta may be dismissed with all his file of papers,
not as himself deceiving, but as singularly liable to deception, of
which he has otherwise given us several signal instances. For example he
believes himself to have enjoyed the high privilege of beholding the
Prince of Darkness upon two separate occasions. The first was in 1885 at
Castelnuovo-Garfagnana in a beautiful old walled garden, belonging to a
high-grade Mason named Orestes Cecchi, a fast friend of Margiotta. The
time was the forenoon, and the two Masons were smoking under the shade
of green trees surrounded by floral delights. Margiotta was a
spiritualist and a follower of Allan Kardec; Cecchi had a turn for the
Vedas and the occultism of the Eastern world; they were chatting upon
the possibility of transmigration; the one doubted, the other affirmed;
Cecchi, to convince his companion, informed him that he possessed a
familiar who invariably appeared to him under the form of a goat, but he
had a look in his eye which proved positively that he was the Grand
Architect of the Universe! That there might be no doubt about the matter
Cecchi called his familiar, who appeared suddenly, and joyfully caressed
his master, at whose command he subsequently licked the hand of the
overwhelmed Signor Margiotta, and it became red and painful. Cecchi
playfully chided the apparition for not assuming human form, and hinted
at the propriety of doing so, but the animal knowingly nodded and
incontinently scurried away. Now, I put it to my readers, that Cecchi
was exploiting his friend, that a domesticated animal appeared at the
summons of his owner in a wooded garden, and that Signor Margiotta is
fooling when he pretends to believe that it was the devil.

The second experience was at Naples under the roof of Pessina, about
half-past ten in the evening, after a Lodge meeting of the Misraim rite.
Then and there, as a matter of cordial good fellowship, the
accommodating Imperial Grand Master evoked a devil to give evidence of
his actuality to Margiotta, who, in spite of the episode of the goat,
still posed as a doubting Thomas. It was managed by means of a
whisky-bottle, out of which, after certain invocations and magical
ceremonies, a vapour rose mysteriously, and resolved itself into a
human figure