twenty words of advice,
which I may follow or may not, as my judgment dictates; and before I
have answered or recovered from my surprise, he will have vanished,
apparently into space; for if I ask my servants where he is gone they
will stare at me as if I were crazy, until I show them that the room is
empty, and accuse them of going to sleep instead of seeing who goes in
and out of my apartment. He speaks more languages than I do, and better.
He once told me he was educated in Edinburgh, and his perfect knowledge
of European affairs and of European topics leads me to think he must
have been there a long time. Have you ever looked into the higher phases
of Buddhism? It is a very interesting study."

"Yes, I have read something about it. Indeed I have read a good deal,
and have thought more. The subject is full of interest, as you say. If I
had been an Asiatic by birth, I am sure I should have sought to attain
_moksha_, even if it required a lifetime to pass through all the degrees
of initiation. There is something so rational about their theories,
disclaiming, as they do, all supernatural power; and, at the same time,
there is something so pure and high in their conception of life, in
their ideas about the ideal, if you will allow me the expression, that I
do not wonder Edwin Arnold has set our American transcendentalists and
Unitarians and freethinkers speculating about it all, and wondering
whether the East may not have had men as great as Emerson and Channing
among its teachers." I paused. My greatest fault is that if any one
starts me upon a subject I know anything about, I immediately become
didactic. So I paused and reflected that Isaacs, being, as he himself
declared, frequently in the society of an "adept" of a high class, was
sure to know a great deal more than I.

"I too," he said, "have been greatly struck, and sometimes almost
converted, by the beauty of the higher Buddhist thoughts. As for their
apparently supernatural powers and what they do with them, I care
nothing about phenomena of that description. We live in a land where
marvels are common enough. Who has ever explained the mango trick, or
the basket trick, or the man who throws a rope up into the air and then
climbs up it and takes the rope after him, disappearing into blue space?
And yet you have seen those things--I have seen them, every one has seen
them,--and the performers claim no supernatural agency or assistance. It
is merely a difference of