water became active and turbid. The seer was convulsed, she ground her teeth, and exhibited every sign of nervous excitement. At last she saw and began to speak. What was taking place that very moment at hundreds of miles from Paris, in Vienna or Saint Petersburg, in America or Pekin, as well as things which were going to occur only some weeks, months, or years later, she declared that she saw distinctly in the globe. The operation had succeeded; the adepts were transported with delight.”

Cagliostro became involved in the affair of the Diamond Necklace, and was thrown into the Bastille. Though eventually liberated, he was compelled to leave Paris. He made one remarkable prediction: That the Bastille would one day be razed to the ground. How well that prophecy was realized, history relates. In the year 1789 the enchanter was in Rome, at the inn of the Golden Sun. He endeavored to found one of his Egyptian Lodges in the Eternal City, but the Holy Inquisition pounced down upon him, adjudged him guilty of the crime of Freemasonry—a particularly heinous offense in Papal Territory—and condemned him to death. The sentence, however, was commuted by the Pope to perpetual imprisonment in the gloomy fortress of San Leon, Urbino. The manner of his death, nay the day of his death, is uncertain, but it is supposed to have taken place one August morning in the year 1790. The beautiful Lorenza Feliciani, called by her admirers the “Flower of Vesuvius,” ended her days in a convent, sincerely repentant, it is said, of her life of impostures.

III.

With Cagliostro, so-called genuine magic died. Of the great pretenders to occultism he was the last to win any great fame, although there has been a feeble attempt to revive thaumaturgy in this nineteenth century by Madame Blavatsky. Science has laughed away sorcery, witchcraft, and necromancy. Prior to Cagliostro’s time a set of men arose calling themselves faiseurs, who practiced the art of sleight-of-hand, allied to natural magic. They gave very amusing and interesting exhibitions. Very few of these conjurers laid claim to occult powers, but ascribed their jeux, or tricks, to manual dexterity, mechanical and scientific effects. These magicians soon became popular.

Towards the middle of the eighteenth century we hear of Jonas, Androletti, Carlotti, Pinetti, Katerfelto, Philadelphus Philadelphia, Rollin, Comus I. and II. Pinetti, when he arrived in London in 1784, displayed the following advertisement: “The Chevalier Pinetti with his Consort will exhibit most wonderful, stupendous, and absolutely inimitable, mechanical, physical, and philosophical pieces, which his recent deep scrutiny in those sciences, and assiduous exertions, have enabled him to invent and construct; among which Chevalier Pinetti will have the special honor and satisfaction of exhibiting various experiments of new discovery, no less curious than seemingly incredible, particularly that of Madame Pinetti being seated in one of the front boxes, with a handkerchief over her eyes, and guessing at everything imagined and proposed to her by any person in the company.” Here we have the first mention of the second-sight trick, which in the hands of latter-day artists has become so popular. Houdin rediscovered it, passed it on to Robert Heller who improved it, and at the present time the conjurer Kellar makes it his pièce de résistance. Rollin had a romantic career. He accumulated a fortune at conjuring, and purchased the chateau of Fontenay-aux-Roses, in the department of the Seine. Says H. J. Burlingame, an interesting writer on magic: “Rollin incurred the suspicions of the Committee of Public Safety in 1793, and suffered death by the guillotine. On the warrant for his execution being read to him, he turned to those about him, and observed, ‘This is the first paper I cannot conjure away.’ Rollin was the grandfather of the late political celebrity of that name, who was minister of the interior in the provisional government of France of 1848.”

Comus II., who played in London in the year 1793, gave a curious exhibition of conjuring tricks and automata. His programme announced that the Great Comus would present “various uncommon experiments with his ‘Enchanted Horologium,’ ‘Pyxidus Literarum,’ and many curious operations in ‘Rhabdology,’ ‘Stenaganagraphy,’ and ‘Phylacteria,’ with many wonderful performances of the grand ‘Dodecahedron,’ also ‘Chartomantic Deceptions’ and ‘Kharamatic Operations.’ To conclude with the performance of the ‘Teretopæst Figure and Magical House’; the like never seen in this kingdom before, and will astonish every beholder.”

In the height of the French Revolution, when the guillotine reeked with blood and the ghastly knitting-women sat round it counting the heads as they fell into the basket, a Belgian optician, named Etienne Gaspard Robertson, arrived in Paris, and opened a wonderful exhibition in an abandoned chapel belonging to the Capuchin convent. The curiosity-seekers who attended these séances were conducted by ushers down dark flights of stairs to the vaults of the chapel and seated in a gloomy crypt shrouded with black draperies and pictured with the emblems of mortality. An antique lamp, suspended from the ceiling, emitted a flame of spectral blue. When all was ready a rain and wind storm, with thunder accompanying, began. Robertson extinguished the lamp and threw various essences on a brazier of burning coals in the center of the room, whereupon clouds of odoriferous incense filled the apartment. Suddenly, with the solemn sound of a far-off organ, phantoms of the great arose at the incantations of the magician. Shades of Voltaire, Rousseau, Marat, and Lavoisier appeared in rapid succession. Robertson, at the end of the entertainment, generally concluded by saying: “I have shown you, citizens, every species of phantom, and there is but one more truly terrible specter—the fate which is reserved for us all.” In a moment a grinning skeleton stood in the center of the hall waving a scythe. All these wonders were perpetrated through the medium of a phantasmagoric lantern, which threw images upon smoke. This was a great improvement on the simple concave mirror which so terrified Cellini. The effect of this entertainment was electrical; all Paris went wild over it. Robertson, lucky fellow, managed to save his neck from “La Guillotine,” and returned to his native province with a snug fortune to die of old age in a comfortable feather bed.

Clever as was Robertson’s ghost illusion, performed by the aid of the phantasmagoric lantern, it had one great defect: the images were painted on glass and lacked the necessary vitality. It was reserved for the nineteenth century to produce the greatest of spectral exhibitions, that of Prof. Pepper, manager of the London Polytechnic Institution. In the year 1863, he invented a clever device for projecting the images of living persons in the air. The illusion is based on a simple optical effect. In the evening carry a lighted candle to the window and you will see reflected in the pane, not only the image of the candle but that of your hand and face as well. The same illusion may be seen while traveling in a lighted railway carriage at night; you gaze through the clear sheet of glass of the coach window and behold your “double” traveling along with you. The apparatus for producing the Pepper ghost has been used in dramatizations of Bulwer’s “Strange Story,” Dickens’ “Haunted Man” and “Christmas Carol,” and Dumas’ “Corsican Brothers.” In France the conjurers Robin and Lassaigne presented the illusion with many novel and startling effects.

One of the most famous of the eighteenth-century magicians was Torrini, a French nobleman, whose real name was the Comte de Grisi. His father, a devoted