, wearing a golden crown, with a brilliant star in the
middle. According to the picture which accompanies this delicious
narrative, the apparition had the wings of a bat and a tail of the
bovine class. It was Beffabuc, the familiar of the magician, who begged
him to enlighten the sceptic, but the latter, according to the
apparition, was protected by a higher power and would never be persuaded
to believe in him. Signor Margiotta gives the names of all who were
present at the evocation--twelve members of the 33rd degree, to say
nothing of Misraim dignities. I submit, however, that the episode of the
bottle would split the rock of Peter, that the absence of Signor Pessina
for twenty minutes previous to the performance, eked out with a little
ventriloquism, and some Pepper accessories would explain much, and that
there is also another hypothesis which I will leave to the discernment
of my readers, and to which I lean personally.

Our witness, in any case, would not be a _persona grata_ to the Society
for Psychical Research. As he is violent in his enmities, so is he
gullible in marvels. His impeachment of Adriano Lemmi must be ruled
completely out of court; his thaumaturgic experiences are paltry
trickeries; his account of Albert Pike is largely borrowed matter; the
magical practices which he attributes to Pessina are derived from the
Little Albert and other well known grimoires; the most that follows from
his narrative is that certain Italian Masons, probably atheists at
heart, pose as partisans of Satan simply to accentuate their derisions
of all religious ideas, much after the manner of Voltaire in some of his
cynical correspondence. It is a continental form of pleasantry, and an
artistic experiment in blasphemy which is taken seriously by the unwise.

I need hardly add that the story of _Aut Diabolus aut Nihil_, which is
accepted literally by Doctor Bataille, is also the subject of
reverential belief on the part of Signor Margiotta, and as an
illustration of his classifying talent, he terms Adriano Lemmi a Mormon
because, having obtained a divorce, he, in the course of time,
contracted another marriage. Furthermore, the very strong testimony
which Signor Margiotta gives to Dr Bataille, directly by eulogium and
indirectly by citation, as also the intimate relations which he
maintained with Diana Vaughan, make his value as a witness of Lucifer
dependent, to a large extent, upon the credibility of these persons,
with cons