or impossible.'

Was this coincidence, or prevision, or what Mr. Dessoir calls the
'falsification of memory'? The thing was either a miracle, which none of
us is prepared to accept, or the after-confusion of a vague foreboding
with an actual occurrence in the mind of the observer. Mr. Dessoir
suggested another explanation of crystal pictures in the doctrine of the
double consciousness of the human soul; but that opens up another
subject.

While we have seen that mirror and crystal-reading is one of the most
ancient of occult practices, we have also seen that it is practised in
our own country even at this day. Moreover, it is said that there is in
England a wholesale manufacture of magic mirrors as a regular
industry--the site of which, however, the present writer is unable to
specify.

CHAPTER IV.

THE MAGIC MOON.

Certainly since, and probably long before, Job 'beheld the moon walking
in brightness,' all the peoples of the earth have surrounded that
luminary with legends, with traditions, with myths, and with
superstitions of various kinds. In our time, and in our own country, the
sentiment with which the orb of night is regarded is a soft and pleasing
one, for

'That orbed maiden, with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,'

is supposed to look with approval upon happy lovers, and with sympathy
upon those who are encountering the proverbial rough places in the
course of true love. Why the moon should be partial to lovers one might
easily explain on very prosaic grounds--perhaps not unlike the reasoning
of the Irishman who called the sun a coward because he goes away as soon
as it begins to grow dark, whereas the blessed moon stays with us most
of the night!

Except Lucian and M. Jules Verne, one does not readily recall anyone who
professes to have been actually up to the moon. Lucian had by far the
most eventful experience, for he met Endymion, who entertained him
royally, and did all the honours of the planet to which he had been
wafted from earth in his sleep. The people of Moonland, Lucian assures
us, live upon flying frogs, only they do not eat them; they cook the
frogs on a fire and swallow the smoke. For drink, he says, they pound
air in a mortar, and thus obtain a liquid very like dew. They have
vines, only the grapes yield not wine, but water, being, in fact,
hailstones, such as descend upon the earth when the wind shakes the
vines in the moon. Then the Moonfolk have a singul