agencies of witchcraft are invoked for the
purposes of guilt.

The Englishman, to whom the culture of this
latter and darker kind of magic was ascribed, Sir
Philip Derval had never hitherto come across. He
now met him at the house of Haroun; decrepit,
emaciated, bowed down with infirmities, and
racked with pain. Though little more than sixty,
his aspect was that of extreme old age, but still
on his face there were seen the ruins of a once
singular beauty; and still, in his mind, there
was a force that contrasted the decay of the
body. Sir Philip had never met with an
intellect more powerful and more corrupt. The
son of a notorious usurer, heir to immense
wealth, and endowed with the talents which
justify ambition, he had entered upon life
burdened with the odium of his father's name. A
duel, to which he had been provoked by an
ungenerous taunt on his origin, but in which a
temperament fiercely vindictive had led him to
violate the usages prescribed by the social laws
that regulate such encounters, had subjected him to
a trial in which he escaped conviction, either by
a flaw in the technicalities of legal procedure, or
by the compassion of the jury;* but the moral
presumptions against him were sufficiently strong
to set an indelible brand on his honour, and an
insurmountable barrier to the hopes which his
early ambition had conceived. After this trial he
had quitted his country to return to it no more.
Thenceforth, much of his life had been passed out
of sight or conjecture of civilised men, in remote
regions and amongst barbarous tribes. At intervals,
however, he had reappeared in European
capitals; shunned by and shunning his equals,
surrounded by parasites, amongst whom were
always to be found men of considerable learning,
whom avarice or poverty subjected to the
influences of his wealth. For the last nine or
ten years he had settled in Persia, purchased
extensive lands, maintained the retinue, and
exercised more than the power, of an Oriental
prince. Such was the man who, prematurely
worn out, and assured by physicians that he had
not six weeks of life, had come to Aleppo with
the gaudy escort of an Eastern satrap, had
caused himself to be borne in his litter to the
mud-hut of Haroun the Sage, and now called
on the magician, in whose art was his last hope,
to reprieve him from the—grave.

* The reader will here observe a discrepancy
between Mrs. Poyntz's account and Sir Philip Derval's
narrative.According to the former, Louis Grayle
was tried in  his absence from England, and
sentenced to three years' imprisonment, which his
flight enabled  him to evade. According to the
latter, Louis  Grayle stood his trial, and obtained an
acquittal. Sir Philip's account must, at least, be
nearer the truth than the lady's, because Louis
Grayle could not, according to English law, have
been tried on a capital charge without being present
in court. Mrs. Poyntz tells her story as a woman
generally does tell a story—sure to make a mistake
where she touches on a question of law; and—
unconsciously perhaps to herself—the Woman of the
World warps the facts in her narrative so as to save
the personal dignity of the hero, who has captivated
her interest, not from the moral odium of a great
crime, but the debasing position of a prisoner at the
bar. Allen Fenwick, no doubt, purposely omits to
notice the discrepancy between these two statements,
or to animadvert on the mistake which, in the eyes
of a lawyer, would discredit Mrs. Poyntz's. It is
consistent with some of the objects for which
Allen Fenwick makes public his Strange Story, to
invite the reader to draw his own inferences from
the contradictions by which, even in the most
common-place matters (and how much more in any
tale of wonder!), a fact stated by one person is made
to differ from the same fact stated by another. The
rapidity with which a truth becomes transformed
into fable, when it is once sent on its travels
from lip to lip, is illustrated by an amusement
at this moment in fashion. The amusement is
this: In a party of eight or ten persons, let one
whisper to another an account of some supposed
transaction, or a piece of invented gossip relating
to absent persons, dead or alive; let the person,
who thus first hears the story, proceed to whisper
it, as exactly as he can remember what he has
just heard, to the next; the next does the same
to his neighbour, and so on, till the tale has run
round of the party. Each narrator, as soon as he
has whispered his version of the tale, writes down
what he has whispered. And though, in this game,
no one has had any interest to misrepresent, but, on
the contrary, each, for his own credit's sake, strives
to repeat what he has heard as faithfully as he can, it
will be almost invariably found that the story told
by the first person has received the most material
alterations before it has reached the eighth or the
tenth. Sometimes, the most important feature of
the whole narrative is altogether omitted; sometimes,
a feature altogether new, and preposterously absurd,
has been added. At the close of the experiment
one is tempted to exclaim, "How, after this,
can any of those portions of history which the
chronicler took from hearsay, be believed?" But,
above all, does not every anecdote of scandal which
aas passed, not through ten lips, but perhaps
through ten thousand, before it has reached us,
become quite as perplexing to him who would get at
the truth, as the marvels he recounts are to the
bewildered reason of Fenwick the Sceptic?

He turned round to Sir Philip when the latter
entered the room, and exclaimed in English, "I
am here because you are. Your intimacy with this
man was known to me. I took your
character as the guarantee of his own. Tell me that
I am no credulous dupe. Tell him that I, Louis
Grayle, am no needy petitioner. Tell me of his
wisdom; assure him of my wealth."

Sir Philip looked inquiringly at Haroun, who
remained seated on his carpet in profound silence.

"What is it you ask of Haroun?"

"To live on—to live on. For every year of life
he can give me, I will load these floors with
gold."

"Gold will not tempt Haroun."

"What will?"

"Ask him yourself; you speak his language."

"I have asked him; he vouchsafes me no
answer."