. He was unmarried, and was a most distinguished-looking old
gentleman with his snow-white imperial and moustache. He was
unquestionably a little eccentric in his habits. He had rendered some
signal service to the Mexican Government while British Minister there,
by settling a dispute between them and the French authorities. The
Mexican Government had out of gratitude presented him with a splendid
Mexican saddle, with pommel, stirrups and bit of solid silver, and with
the leather of the saddle most elaborately embroidered in silver. Sir
Charles kept this trophy on a saddle-tree in his study at Lisbon, and
it was his custom to sit on it daily for an hour or so. He said that as
he was too old to ride, the feel of a saddle under him reminded him of
his youth. When every morning I brought the old gentleman the day's
dispatches, I always found him seated on his saddle, a cigar in his
mouth, a skull-cap on his head, and his feet in the silver
shoe-stirrups. Sir Charles had been a great friend of the first Lord
Lytton, the novelist, and they had together dabbled in Black Magic. Sir
Charles declared that the last chapters in Bulwer-Lytton's wonderful
imaginative work, A STRANGE STORY, describing the preparation of the
Elixir of Life in the heart of the Australian Bush, were all founded on
actual experience, with the notable reservation that all the recorded
attempts made to produce this magic fluid had failed from their very
start. He had in his younger days joined a society of Rosicrucians, by
which I do not mean the Masonic Order of that name, but persons who
sought to penetrate into the Forbidden Domain. Some forty years ago a
very interesting series of articles appeared in Vanity Fair (the weekly
newspaper, not Thackeray's masterpiece), under the title of "The Black
Art." In one of these there was an account of a seance which took place
at the Pantheon in Oxford Street, in either the "forties" or the
"fifties." A number of people had hired the hall, and the Devil was
invoked in due traditional form, Then something happened, and the
entire assemblage rushed terror-stricken into Oxford Street, and
nothing would induce a single one of them to re-enter the building. Sir
Charles owned that he had been present at the seance, but he would
never tell me what it was that frightened them all so; he said that he
preferred to forget the whole episode. Sir Charles had an idea that I
was a "sensitive," so, after getting my leave to try his