"You, sir, look like a grave, kind man, and seem to have a regard for my
brother. You, then, will help us, no doubt, to cure him of an illusion
which troubles us. A dead girl, he says, met him, and he touched her
hand."

"And do you, sweet child, think that impossible?" the Magian asked with
gentle gravity. "Have the thousands who bring not merely fruit and wine
and money for their dead, but who even burn a black sheep for them--you,
perhaps, have done the same--have they, I ask, done this so long in
vain? I can not believe it. Nay, I know from the ghosts themselves that
this gives them pleasure; so they must have the organs of sense."

"That we may rejoice departed souls by food and drink," said Melissa,
eagerly, "and that daimons at times mingle with the living, every one
of course, believes; but who ever heard that warm blood stirred in them?
And how can it be possible that they should remunerate a service with
money, which certainly was not coined in their airy realm, but in the
mint here?"

"Not too fast, fair maid," replied the Magian, raising a warning hand.
"There is no form which these intermediate beings can not assume. They
have the control of all and everything which mortals may use, so the
soul of Korinna revisiting these scenes may quite well have paid the
ferryman with an obolus."

"Then you know of it?" asked Melissa in surprise; but the Magian broke
in, saying:

"Few such things remain hidden from him who knows, not even the
smallest, if he strives after such knowledge."

As he spoke he gave the girl such a look as made her eyelids fall, and
he went on with greater warmth: "There would be fewer tears shed by
death-beds, my child, if we could but show the world the means by which
the initiated hold converse with the souls of the dead."

Melissa shook her pretty head sadly, and the Magian kindly stroked her
waving hair; then, looking her straight in the eyes, he said: "The dead
live. What once has been can never cease to be, any more than out
of nothing can anything come. It is so simple; and so, too, are the
workings of magic, which amaze you so much. What you call magic, when I
practice it, Eros, the great god of love, has wrought a thousand times
in your breast. When your heart leaps at your brother's caress, when
the god's arrow pierces you, and the glance of a lover fills you with
gladness, when the sweet harmonies of fine music wrap your soul above
this earth, or the wail of a child moves yo