at the end of it, and in a sense at the beginning of it too.  At times even now I can conjure up a vision of the broad, sombre Petrograd streets, with the dull cotton-wool sky pressing down almost on to the house-tops; the vast silent crowds thronging the thoroughfares, and the tumbrils rolling slowly forward through the crowded streets to the place of execution, accompanied by the gay strains of the march from Fatinitza.  The hideous incongruity between the tune and the occasion made one positively shudder.

There is in the Russian temperament a peculiar unbalanced hysterical element.  This, joined to a distinct bent towards the mystic, and to a large amount of credulity, has made Russia for two hundred years the happy hunting-ground of charlatans and impostors of various sorts claiming supernatural powers:  clairvoyants, mediums, yogis, and all the rest of the tribe who batten on human weaknesses, and the perpetual desire to tear away the veil from the Unseen.  It so happened that my chief at Lisbon had in his youth dabbled in the Black Art.  Sir Charles Wyke was a dear old man, who had spent most of his Diplomatic career in Mexico and the South American Republics.  He spoke Spanish better than any other Englishman I ever knew, with the one exception of Sir William Barrington.  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