not learn until long after
Florence had receded into the distance in my memory. But one afternoon,
with my father and mother, I entered the door of a queer old house close
to the Ponte Vecchio; I was told that it had formerly been a palace of
the Knights Templars. We ascended a very darksome flight of stairs, and
a door was opened by a strange little man. He may have been, at that
time, some seventy years my senior, but he was little above my height;
he had long, soft, white hair and a flowing white beard; his features
bore a resemblance to those of Bulwer Lytton, only Bulwer never lived to
anything like Mr. Kirkup's age. Old as he was, our host was very brisk
and polite, and did the honors of his suite of large rooms with much
grace and fantastic hospitality. Dancing about him, and making friends
freely with us all meanwhile, was the little girl, Imogen by name, who
was accredited as the octogenarian's offspring. She was some four or
five years of age, but intellectually precocious, though a complete
child, too. Mr. Kirkup said that she, like her beautiful mother, was a
powerful medium, and that he often used to communicate through her with
her mother, who would seem to have kept her secret even after death. The
house was stuffed full of curiosities, but was very dirty and cobwebby;
the pictures and the books looked much in need of a caretaker. The
little child frolicked and flitted about the dusky apartments, or seated
herself like a butterfly on the great tomes of magic that were piled in
corners. Nothing could be stronger or stranger than the contrast between
her and this environment. My father wrote it all down in his journal,
and it evidently impressed his imagination; and she and Kirkup
himself--_mutatis mutandis_--appear in Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, and
again, in a somewhat different form, in The Dolliver Romance. There
was even a Persian kitten, too, to bear little Imogen company. But no
fiction could surpass the singularity of this withered old magician
living with the pale, tiny sprite of a child of mysterious birth in the
ghost-haunted rooms of the ancient palace.

It seemed as if the world of the occult were making a determined attack
upon us during this Florentine sojourn; whichever way we turned we came
in contact with something mysterious. In one of my father's unpublished
diaries he writes, in reference to the stories with which he was being
regaled by Powers, the Brownings, and others, that he was remind