you shall hear further from me."

"I am tempted to ask your highness the last question you proposed to the
sorcerer," said I to the prince, when we were alone. "Do you believe
the second ghost to have been a real and true one?"

"I believe it! No, not now, most assuredly."

"Not now? Then you did once believe it?"

"I confess I was tempted for a moment to believe it something more than
the contrivance of a juggler."

"And I could wish to see the man who under similar circumstances would
not have had the same impression. But what reasons have you for
retracting your opinion? What the prisoner has related of the Armenian
ought to increase rather than diminish your belief in his super natural
powers."

"What this wretch has related of him," said the prince, interrupting me
very gravely. "I hope," continued he, "you have now no doubt but that
we have had to do with a villain."

"No; but must his evidence on that account--"

"The evidence of a villain, even supposing I had no other reason for
doubt, can have no weight against common sense and established truth.
Does a man who has already deceived me several times, and whose trade it
is to deceive, does he deserve to be heard in a cause in which the
unsupported testimony of even the most sincere adherent to truth could
not be received? Ought we to believe a man who perhaps never once spoke
truth for its own sake? Does such a man deserve credit, when he appears
as evidence against human reason and the eternal laws of nature? Would
it not be as absurd as to admit the accusation of a person notoriously
infamous against unblemished and irreproachable innocence?"

"But what motives could he have for giving so great a character to a man
whom he has so many reasons to hate?"

"I am not to conclude that he can have no motives for doing this because
I am unable to comprehend them. Do I know who has bribed him to deceive
me? I confess I cannot penetrate the whole contexture of his plan; but
he has certainly done a material injury to the cause he advocates by
proving himself to be at least an impostor, and perhaps something
worse."

"The circumstance of the ring, I allow, appears somewhat suspicions."

"It is more than suspicious," answered the prince; "it is decisive. He
received this ring from the murderer, and at the moment he received it
he must have been certain that it was from the murderer. Who but the
assassin, could have taken from the finger of the deceased a rin