on the day of their publication; and a craze, social or
scientific, has almost been forgotten by the fashionable world before it
manages to establish any kind of footing in our midst.

It therefore came upon us with more or less of a shock one morning a
short time ago to find the walls of our sleepy little country town
placarded with naming posters announcing that Professor Dmitri
Sclamowsky intended to visit Bishopsthorpe on the following Friday, for
the purpose of exhibiting in the Town Hall some of his marvellous powers
in Thought Reading, Mesmerism, and Hypnotism.

Stray rumours from time to time, and especially of late, had visited us
of strange experiments in connection with these outlandish sciences, if
sciences they can be called; but we had received these with incredulity,
mingled with compassion for such weak-minded persons as could be easily
duped by the clever conjuring of paid charlatans.

This, at least, was very much the mental attitude of my aunt Phoebe, and
it was only under strong pressure from me and one or two others of her
younger and more enterprising section of Bishopsthorpe society that she
at last reluctantly consented to patronise the Professor's performance
in person.

Even at the last moment she almost failed us.

"I am getting too old a woman, my dear Elizabeth," she said to me as I
was helping her to dress, "to leave my comfortable fireside after dinner
for the sake of seeing second-rate conjuring."

"Indeed, it is good of you," I said, as I disposed a piece of soft old
point lace in graceful folds round the neck of her black velvet dress;
"but virtue will be its own reward, for I am sure you will enjoy it as
much as any of us, and as for being too old, that is all nonsense! Just
look in the glass, and then say if you have a heart to cheat
Bishopsthorpe of a sight of you in all your glory."

"You are a silly girl, Elizabeth!" said my aunt, and yet she did as I
suggested, and, walking up to the long pier-glass, looked at her
reflection with a well pleased smile. "Indeed," she continued, turning
back to me to where I stood by the dressing-table, "I think I am as
silly as you are, to rig myself out like this," and she pointed to the
double row of large single diamonds I had clasped round her neck, and
the stars of the same precious stones which twinkled and flashed in the
lace of her cap.

"Come, Aunt Phoebe," I said, drawing down her hands, which had made a
movement as though she wo