CHAPTER XXIV.

PROJECTION OF THE DOUBLE.

ALL theories and speculations upon the duplex corporeity of man, i. e., of his possession of an astral, or phantasmal, body as well as a physical body, only lead up to the point where one demands proof before going further. It is so incredible to the materialistic mind as transcending common experience, that it is most likely to be pushed aside as a dream than accepted as even a working hypothesis. This, in fact, has been its handling by the average scientist, and when a braver investigator than the ordinary affirms it as his belief, he risks that reputation for cold caution which is presumed, with laughable inconsistency nevertheless, to be the mark of the true scientific discoverer. Yet many books as jirecise and suggestive as D'Assier's* have been published at different times, chief among them being the Phantasms of the Living, by Messrs. Gurney, Myers, and Podmore, and present a solid front of facts impossible to deny, however difficult to believe.

* Posthumous Htijnanity : a Study of Phantoms, 374  

 The case seems now to ha^■e been amply proved by the compilation of several thousand observed phenomena of this class : and the time seems to have come when the metaphysician who ignores them has no right to claim to be regarded as a trustworthy teacher of men. Yet, while the reason may be convinced by this array of facts, the real existence of the astral body, and the possibility)' of its separation from the physical " sheath " during life can only be known in one of two ways — by one's seeing the astral body of another person, or by projecting one's own and viewing one's physical body ah cxtrd. With either of these experiences, one can say he KNOWS ; with both, his knowledge becomes absolute and unshakable. I have had both. I take the witness stand, and testify to the truth for the helping of my fellow-workers. I pass over with a bare mention the incidents of my seeing H. P. B. in her astral body in a New York street, while her physical body was in Philadelphia ; of my seeing similarly a friend who was then in body in a Southern State, several hundred miles .iwav ; of seeing in an American railway train and on an American steamboat, a certain adept then physically in Asia ; of receiving from the hand of another, at Jummu, a telegram sent me there by H. P. B. from Madras, and delivered to me by the adept under the guise of the Kashmiri telegraph-peon, whose appearance he borrowed momentarily for the purpose, and dissolved a moment later in full moonlight when I stepped to the door to watch him ; of being saluted on World Bridge, Bombay, by another of these majestic men on another tropical evening as H. P. B., Damodar, and I sat in our phaeton enjoying the heat lightning and the cooling breeze off the sea ; of seeing him moving towards us from a little distance, advance to the very carriage side, lay his hand on H. P. B.'s, walk fifty yards away, and suddenly disappear from our sight on the causeway, bare of trees, shrubs, or other places of concealment, in the full sheen of the lightning : I pass these and other such experiences, and come to the one which of all was the most momentous in its consequences upon the course of my life. The story has been told before, but it had its place in the present retrospect, for it was the chief among the causes of my abandonment of the world and my coming out to my Indian home. Hence it was one of the chief factors in the upbuilding of the Theosophical Society. I do not mean to say that without it I should not have come to India, for my heart had been leaping within me to come, from the time when I learned what India had been to the world, what she might be made again. An insatiable longing had possessed me to come to the land of the Rishis and the Buddhas, the Sacred Land among lands ; but I could not see my way clear to breaking the ties of circumstance which bound me to America, and I might have felt compelled to put it off to that " convenient season " which so often never comes to the procrastinator and waiter upon the turn of events. This experience in question, however, settled my fate ; in an instant doubts melted away, the clear foresight of a fixed will showed the way, and before the dawn of that sleepless night came, I began to devise the means and to bend all things to that end. The happening was thus :

Our evening's work on Isis was finished, I had bade good-night to H. P. B., retired to my own room, closed the door as usual, sat me down to read and smoke, and was soon absorbed in my book ; which, if I remember aright, was Stephens' Travels in Yucatan ; at all events, not a book on ghosts, nor one calculated in the least to stimulate one's imagination to the seeing of spectres. My chair and table were to the left in front of the door, my camp-cot to the right, the window facing the door, and over the table a wall gas-jet. The following simple ground plan will convey the correct idea of the premises of the " Lamasery," although not accurate as to the measurements.  

Explanation. — A, our working and only reception room ; B, bed-room of H. P. B. ; C, my bed-room ; D, a small, dark bed-room ; E, passage ; F, kitchen ; G, dining-room ; H, bath-room ; I, hanging closet ; J, exterior door of the flat opening upon the house staircase ; always closed with a spring-latch and locked at night. In my room, a is the chair where I sat reading ; b the table ; c the chair where my visitor seated himself during the interview ; J my camp-cot. In our work-room e is where the cuckoo clock hung, and f the place of the hanging shelves against which I bruised myself. In B, g represents the place of H. P. B.'s bed. The door of my room, it will be seen, was to my right as I sat, and any opening of it would have at onrc been noticed ; the more so, since it was locked, to the best of my present recollection. That I am not more positive will not seem strange in view of the mental excitement into which the passing events threw me ; events so astonishing as to make me forget various minor details which, under a cooler frame of mind, would perhaps have been retained in my memory.

Eighth Avenue  

I was quietly reading, with all my attention centered on my book. Nothing in the evening's incidents had prepared me for seeing an adept in his astral body ; I had not wished for it, tried to conjure it up in ray fancy, nor in the least expected it. All at once, as I read with my shoulder a little turned from the door, there came a gleam of something white in the right-hand corner of my right eye ; I turned my head, dropped my book in astonishment, and saw towering above me in his great stature an Oriental clad in white garments, and wearing a head-cloth or turban of amber-striped fabric, hand embroidered in yellow floss-silk. Long raven hair hung from under his turban to the shoulders ; his black beard, parted vertically on the chin in the Rajput fashion, was twisted up at the ends and carried over the ears ; his eyes were alive with soul-fire ; eyes which were at once benignant and piercing in glance ; the eyes of a mentor and a judge, but softened by the love of a father who gazes on a son needing counsel and guidance. He was so grand a man, so imbued with the majesty of moral strength, so luminously spiritual, so evidently above aver age humanity, that I felt abashed in his presence, and bowed my head and bent my knee as one does before a god or a god-like personage. A hand was lightly laid on my head, a sweet though strong voice bade me be seated, and when I raised my eyes, the Presence was seated in the other chair beyond the table. He told me he had come at the crisis when I needed him ; that my actions had brought me to this point ; that it lay with me alone whether he and I should meet often in this life as co workers for the good of mankind ; that a great work was to be done for humanity, and I had the right to share in it if I wished ; that a mysterious tie, not now to be explained to me, had drawn my colleague and myself together ; a tie which could not be broken, however strained it might be at times. He told me things about H. P. B. that I may not repeat, as well as things about myself, that do not concern third parties. How long he was there I cannot tell : it might have been a half-hour or an hour ; it seemed but a minute, so little did I take note of the flight of time. At last he rose, I wondering at his great height and observing the sort of splendour in his countenance — not an external shining, but the soft gleam, as it were, of an inner light — that of the spirit. Suddenly the thought came into my mind :

" What if this be but hallucination ; what if H. P. B. has cast a hypnotic glamour over me ? I wish I had some tangible object to prove to me that he has really been here ; something that I might handle after he is gone ! " The Master smiled kindly as if reading my thought, un twisted the fehid from his head, benignantly saluted me in farewell and — was gone : his chair was empty ; I was alone with my emotions ! Not quite alone, though, for on the table lay the embroidered head-cloth ; a tangible and enduring proof that I had not been " overlooked," or psychically befooled, but had been face to face with one of the Elder Brothers of Humanity, one of the Masters of our dull pupil-race. To run and beat at H. P. B.'s circumstance of my having actually made in 1870 the voyage across the Atlantic with two Hindu gentlemen, one of whom was later our close friend at Bombay — Mooljee Thackersey — entirely slipped out of my mind. This was a clear case of amnesia (loss of memory) for I had not the least intention or interest in concealing so commonplace a circumstance ; the meeting of 1870, fourteen years before the examination of me by the S. P. R., had left no such mark in my memory as to be recalled in my moment of anger, and so the force of my testimony was weakened to that extent. A meeting with Hindus five years or so before I knew H. P. B., and, through her, the real India, would not have been of paramount importance to a man of such multifarious ac quaintanceships and adventures as myself. Yes, it was amnesia ; but amnesia is not lying, and my story is true, even though some may doubt it. And this is the fitting place for me to say that, as some of my chapters were written while travelling, away from my books and papers, and especially as much of it is written from memory only of the long-past events, I beg indulgence for any unintentional mistakes that may be discovered. I try my best to be accurate and certainly shall be truthful.

I now pass on to my personal experiences in projections of the Double. In connection with this phenome non let me give a word of caution to the less advanced student of practical psychology ; the power of withdrawing the astral body from the physical is no necessary proof of high spiritual development. The contrary is believed, by perhaps the majority of dabblers in occultism, but they are wrong. A first and sufficient proof is that the emergence of the astral body happens very often with men and women who have given little or no time to occult research, have followed no yogic system, have made no attempts to do the thing, have usually been frightened or much ashamed and vexed when convicted of it, and have not been in the least remarkable above the average of persons for purity of life and thought, spirituality of ideal, or the "gifts of the spirit" of which the Scripture speaks; often the very opposite. Then, again, the annals of the Black Art teem with number less instances of the visible, and invisible (save clairvoyantly), projection of the Double by wicked persons bent on mischief ; of bilocations, hauntings of hated victims, lycanthropical masqueradings, and other " damnable witchcrafts." Then, again, there are the three or four or more thousand cases of projections of the Double by all sorts and conditions of men, some no better than they should be, if not a good deal worse occasionally, that have been recorded and winnowed down by the S. P. R., and the yet more thousands not garnered into their cast iron granary ; all combining to prove the truth of my warning, that one must not in the least take the mere fact that a certain person can travel — whether consciously or unconsciously it matters not — in the astral body as evidence that that person is either better, wiser, more spiritually advanced, or better qualified to serve as Guru, than any other person not so endowed. It is simply the sign that the subject of the experience has, either congenitally or by subsequent effort, loosened the astral body in its sheath, and so made it easier for it to go out and return again, when the outer body is naturally or hypnotically asleep, hence unobstructive. The reader will recall, in this connection, the satin picture of M. A. Oxon's experiments in this direction which H. P. B. made for me.

Somehow or other, I have never found the time for self training in yoga since I took up my line of practical work in our theosophical movement. I never seemed to care whether I acquired any psychical powers or not, never aspired to guruship, nor cared whether I could or could not attain Liberation during this life. To serve mankind always seemed to me the best of yogas, and the ability to do even a little towards spreading knowledge and diminishing ignorance, an ample reward. So it never entered my mind in the early days that I might train myself as a seer or a wonder-worker, a metaphysician or an adept ; but I have been going on all these years on the hint given me by a Master, that the best way to seek them was through the Theosophical Society : a humble sphere, perhaps, yet one well within my limited capabilities, thoroughly congenial and at the same time useful. In telling about my early goings out of the body, I must not be thought, therefore, to be pluming myself upon my supposed high spiritual development, nor intending to boast of special cleverness as a psychic. The fact is, I presume, I was helped to get this, along with many other psychical experiences, as a basis of the special education needed by one who had such work as mine cut out for him.

Here is one of my facts : H. P. B. and I had one evening in 1876, while we were living in AVest 34th St.,* finished writing a chapter of the original draft of Isis Unveiled, and on parting for the night, laid away the great pile of "copy " in a pasteboard box, with the first page on top, the last at the bottom of the heap. She occupied the flat directly under my own, in the second story of the apartment-house, and both of us, of course, locked our outer doors to keep out thieves. While undressing it occurred to me that if I had added certain three words to the final sentence of the last paragraph, the sense of the whole paragraph would have been strengthened. I was afraid I might forget them in the morning, so the whim came to me that I might try to go down to the writing-room below stairs in my Double and perhaps write them phenomenally. Consciously, I had never travelled thus before, but I knew how it must be at tempted, viz., by fixing the intention to do it firmly in the mind when falling asleep, and I did so. I knew nothing more until the next morning, when, after dressing and taking my breakfast, I stopped in at H. P. B.'s flat to bid her good-bye on my way to my office. " Well," she said, " pray tell me what the deuce you were doing here last night after you went to bed ? " " Doing," I replied, " what do you mean ? " " Why," she rejoined, " I had got into bed and was lying there quietly, when lo ! I saw my Olcott's astral body oozing through the wall. And stupid and sleepy enough you seemed, too ! I spoke to you, but you did not reply. You went to the writing-room and I heard you fumbling with the papers ; and that 's all. What were you about ? " I then told her of my intended experiment : we went together into the other room, emptied out the pile of MS., and on the last page, at the end of the concluding paragraph, found two of the intended three words fully written out in my own handwriting and the third begun, but not finished : the power of concentration seeming to have become exhausted, and the word ending in a scrawl ! How I handled the pencil, if I did handle it, or how I wrote the words without handling it, I cannot say : perhaps I was able just that once to precipitate the writing with the help of one of H. P. B.'s benevolent elementals, by utilising molecules of the plumbago from either of the lead pencils lying on the table along with the manuscript. Be it as it may, the experience was useful.

* Not the " Lamasery," but the place we occupied before going there.  

The reader should take note of the fact that my writing in the phenomenal way stopped at the point where, from inexperience, I let my will wander away from the work in hand. To fix it immovably is the one thing indispensable, just as it is the necessary concomitant of good work on the normal intellectual plane. In the Theosophist for July, 1888 (Art. " Precipitated Pictures at New York"), I explained the connection between the concentration of trained will-power and the permanency of precipitated writings, pictures, and other similar proofs of the creative power of the mind. I instanced the very interesting and suggestive details of the projection of the Double and the precipitation of writing, given by Wilkie Collins in his novel, The Two Destinies — a book, in its way, as well worth reading by any student of occultism,* as Zanoni, A Strange Story, or The Coming Jiaie. I cited, further, the case of the Louis portrait precipitated for Mile. Liebert and myself, which faded out by the next morning, but was caused by H. P. B. to subsequently reappear at Mr. Judge's request, and to be so " fixed " as to be still as sharp and fresh after the lapse of many years as when first made. But no amount of reading or experimentation at second hand can compare with even one little original experience, like the one of mine above described, in its power to make one realise the truth of the universal cosmic operation of thought creating form. The s'loka Bah^syam Prajdyeyaiti, etc.

* It was this article which caused Mr. Collins to write me that, among the incidents of his life, none had more surprised him than his finding from my notice of his book that he had by the viere exercise of the imagination, apparently stumbled on one of the mysterious laws of occult science.

(Vlth Anuvdka, 2nd Valli, Taittiryiaka-Upanishad), " He (Brahma) wished, may I be many, may I grow forth. He brooded over himself. After he had thus brooded, he sent forth all, whatever there is. Having sent forth, he entered it ; " is to me profoundly instructive. It has a meaning immeasurably deeper, truer, more suggestive to one who has himself meditated axid. then created form,  than to him whose eyes have but read the words on the page, without the echoing assent coming from within one's being.

I recall another case of my projecting my Double, which illustrates the law known as " repercussion." The reader may find the amplest materials for forming a correct opinion on this subject in the literature of Witch craft, Sorcery, and Magic. The word " repercussion " means, in this connection, the reacting upon one's physical body of a blow, stab, or other injury, inflicted upon the Double while it is projected and moving about as a separate entity : " bilocation " is the simultaneous appearance of a person in two places ; one appearance that of the physical, the other that of the astral bod)', or Double. M. d'Assier discusses both in his Posthumous Humanity, and in my English version of that excellent work, I add remarks of my own upon the subject. Speaking of the infliction of injuries upon their victims by sorcerers who could duplicate their bodies and visit them in the Double, the author says (p. 224) : "The sorceress entered into the house of him against whom she had a revenge to gratify, and vexed him in a thousand ways. If the latter were resolute, and had a weapon available, it would often happen that he would strike the phantom, and upon recovering from her trance, the sorceress would find upon her own body the wounds she had received in the phantasmal struggle."

Des Mousseaux, the Catholic writer against Sorcery and other " black arts,'' quotes from the judicial archives of England, the case of Jane Brooks, who persecuted a child named Richard Jones after a very malicious fashion. At one of her visitations, the child screamed out that the phantom of Jane was present and pretended to touch it with the point of his finger. A witness named Gilson, springing to the place indicated, slashed at it with a knife, although the phantom was visible only to the child. The house of Jane Brooks was at once visited by Gilson, with the child's father and a constable, and she was found sitting on her stool holding one of her hands with the other. She denied that anything had happened to her hand, but the other being snatched away, the concealed one was found covered with blood, and bearing just such a wound as the child had said had been inflicted on the hand of the phantom by Gilson's knife. A great number of similar cases are on record, all going to prove that any accident or injury to the projected Double reacts and reproduces itself upon the physical body in the identical spot.* This brings me to my own experience.

* The exact duplexity of the astral and physical bodies in man has been affirmed from the remotest ages. It is the Eastern theory that the astral man is the product of his past Karma, and that it moulds the outer encasement according to its own innate qualities, making it i» visible representation of the same. This idea is succinctly embodied in the verse in Spenser's Faerie Queene :

' ' For of the soul the body form doth take. For soul is form, and doth the body make."

In our writing-room at the " Lamasery " there hung upon the wall, beside the chimney, a Swiss cuckoo-clock, which it was my methodical custom to wind up nightly before retiring to my own room. One morning, on going to my toilet-glass after my bath, I noticed that my right eye was black and blue, as though I had received a blow from a fist. I could not account for it in the least, and I was the more puzzled on finding that I had no pain in the injured part. In vain I racked my brain for an explanation. In my bed-room there was no post, pillar, projecting corner, or other obstruction from which I could have received injury, supposing that I had been walking about in my sleep — a habit I had never acquired, by the way. Then, again, a shock, rude enough to have blackened my eye like this, must, of necessity, have wakened me instantaneously at the time, whereas I had slept the night through as quietly as usual. So my be wilderment continued, until I met H. P. B. and a lady friend, who had shared her bed that night, at the breakfast table. The lady friend gave me the clue to the enigma. She said : " Why, Colonel, you must have hit yourself last night when you came in to wind the cuckoo clock ! " " Wind the clock," I replied, " what do you mean by that ? Did you not lock the door when I went to my room ? " " Yes," she said, " I locked it myself ; and how tvsr could you have come in ? Yet both Madame and I saw you pass the sliding-doors of our bed-room and heard you pulling the chain to wind the clock. I called, but you did not answer, and I saw nothing more." Well, then, I thought, if I did enter the room in my Double and wind the clock, two things are inevitable, (a) the clock must show that it was wound last night and not have run down : (^) there must be some obstacle on my path between the door and the opposite chimney against which I could have hit my eye. We examined the premises and found :

1. That the clock was going and had apparently been wound up at the usual time.

r. Just near the door hung a small hanging book shelf, the farthest front corner of one of whose shelves was of the exact height to catch my eye if I had run against it. Then there came back to me the dim recollection of myself moving towards the door from the far side of the room, with my right hand outstretched as if to feel for the door, a sudden shock, " the seeing of stars " — as it is commonly expressed — and then oblivion until morning.

That is curious, it seems to me ; very curious that a blow which, received upon the physical head, must al most inevitably have at once awakened one, should, when falling upon the projected Double, have left its substantial mark behind it by repercussion upon the physical body, without bringing me to consciousness. And the case is instructive in other aspects, as well. It shows that, provided the conditions are favourable for the slipping of the Double out of the physical body, the " duplication " is likely to occur under the stimulus of a thought-prepossession, for instance, that of a daily habit of doing any certain thing at a fixed hour. Supposing the conditions unfavourable tor " projection " or " duplication," the subject would, under another set of conditions, become somnambulistic, rise from bed, go and do what was on his or her mind, and return to bed and to deep slumber without remembering anything that had occurred. The editors of the English version of the Dabistan say : " It is impossible to fix the epoch at which particular opinions and practices originated. . . particularly the belief that a man may attain the faculty to quit and to reassume his body, or to consider it as a loose garment, which he may put off at pleasure for ascending to the world of light, and on his return be reunited with the material elements. All these matters are considered very ancient " (^Dabistan, Preface, Ixxix). One of my most interesting experiences has been to encounter persons in different parts of the world, until then strangers, who have averred that they had seen me in public places, that I had visited them in the astral body, sometimes talked on occult matters with them, sometimes healed them of diseases, sometimes even gone with them on the astral plane to visit our Masters ; yet without my keeping any remembrance of the several incidents. Yet, when one comes to think of it, it is not so improbable, after all, that one whose whole life and every waking thought and wish is bound up in this great movement of ours ; who has no desire save for its success, no ambition save to push it forward to its ultimate goal, should carry his prepossession into the realms of sleep, and float through the currents of the Astral Light towards the kindred beings who are held by the same magnet to the same attractive centre of wish and aspiration. In its truest sense —

" It is the secret sympathy. The silver link, the silver tie, Which heart to heart, and mind to mind. In body and in soul can bind."  

CHAPTER XXV.

SWAMI DYAnAND.

IF I should fail to introduce the episode of our brief and upleasant connection with Swami Dyinand Sarasvati and his Arya Samaj, this could not be called a true history of the beginnings of our Society. I should pre fer to omit it altogether if I could, for it is not agreeable to record the details of vanished hopes, bitter misunderstand ings, and faded illusions. Now that both H. P. B. and the Swami are dead, and that sixteen years have passed since we voted for a blending of the two societies to gether, I feel at liberty to give the clue to what has been hitherto a sort of mystery as regards the incident, and to explain the hidden causes of the union and subsequent quarrel between the great Pandit and ourselves.

I have told all that concerns the formation of the Theosophical Society ; how it originated ; what were its avowed aims and objects ; and how it gradually faded into a small, compact body, of which the two Founders were the dual energy : a mere nucleus of the present   organisation. I make bold to say that not a line can be produced which goes to show that our religious opinions were ever concealed or misrepresented, to whatsoever exoteric creed our correspondents may have belonged. If, therefore, Swami Dyinand and his followers ever misunderstood our position and that of the Theosophi cal Society, the fault was theirs, not ours. Our two hearts drew us towards the Orient, our dreams were of India, our chief desire to get into relations with the Asiatic people. No way, however, had yet opened on the physical plane, and our chance of getting out to our Holy Land seemed very slight, until one evening in the year 1877 an American traveller, who had recently been in India, called. He happened to sit so that, in looking that way I noticed on the wall above him the framed photograph of the two Hindii gentlemen with whom I had made the Atlantic passage in 1870. I took it down, showed it to him, and asked if he knew either of the two. He did know Moolji Thackersey and had quite recently met him in Bombay. I got the address, and by the next mail wrote to Moolji about our Society, our love for India and what caused it. In due course he replied in quite enthusiastic terms, accepted the offered diploma of membership, and told me about a great Hindii pandit and reformer, who had begun a powerful movement for the resuscitation of pure Vedic religion. At the same time he introduced to my notice, in com plimentary terms, one Hurrychund Chintamon, Presi dent of the Bombay Arya Samaj, with whom I chiefly corresponded thereafter ; and whose evil treatment of us on arrival at Bombay is a matter of history. The latter nominated several Hindu gentlemen of Bombay for membership, spoke most flatteringly of Swami Dyinand, and brought about an exchange of letters between the latter and myself as chiefs of our respective societies. Mr. Hurrychund wrote to me, on reading my explana tions of our views as to the impersonality of God — an Eternal and Omnipresent Principle which, under many different names, was the same in all religions — that the principles of the Arya Samaj were identical with our own, and suggested that, in that case, it was useless to keep up two societies, when by amalgamating we would increase our powers of usefulness and our chances of success.* Neither then nor ever since have I cared for the empty honour of leadership, and so I was but too glad to take second place under the Swami, whom I was made to look up to as immeasurably my superior in every respect.

* For a full statement of the case, with documentary proofs, see Extra Supplement, Theosofhist, July, 1882.

The letters of my Bombay corre spondents, my own views about Vedic philosophy, the fact of his being a great Sanskrit pandit and actually playing the part of a Hindd Luther, prepared me to be lieve without difficulty what H. P. B. told me later about him. This was neither more nor less than that he was an adept of the Himalayan Brotherhood inhabiting the Swami's body ; well known to our own teachers, and in relations with them for the accomplishment of the work  he had in hand. AVhat -ivonder that I was as ready as possible to fall in with Hurrychund's scheme to amalga mate the T. S. with the Arya Samaj, and to sit at the S« ami's feet as pupil under a master I To make such a connection I should have been ready, if required, to be his servant and to have rendered him glad ser\-ice for years to come, withoac hope of re" j.rd. So. the matter being explained to my colleagues in New York, our Council, in May, 1S7S, passed a vote to unite the two societies and change the title of ours to " The Theosophi cal Society of the Ar)-a Samaj." This was notified to the Swami, and in due time he returned to me the draft of a new Diploma (now before me as I write) which I had sent him, signed, as requested, with his name and staraped with his own seal. I had this engraved, issued r. ;o a few members who wished to enlist under the new scheme, and put forth a circular reciting the principles under which we intended to work.

S. ar all went well, but, in due course, I received from India an English translation of the rales and doc trines of the Ari,a Samaj, made by Fandit Shyamji Krishnavarma, a protege of the S" ami's, which gave us .-. great shock — gave me, at least. Nothing could have been c.earer than that the Swami's views had radically changed since the preceding August, when the Lahore Arya Sam.ij published his defence of Ms J7..\; I!^Js\\\: against the attacks of his critics, in the course of which he quoted approvingly the opinions of Frof. ^^ax Miiller, Messrs. Colebrooke, G.trrett, and others, that the God of the Vedas was an impersonality. It was evident that the Samaj was not identical in character with our Society, but rather a new sect of Hinduism — aVedicsect accept ing Swami Dydnand's authority as supreme judge as to which portions of the Vedas and Shastras were and were not infallible. The impossibility of carrying out the in tended amalgamation became manifest, and we immedi ately reported that fact to our Indian colleagues. The Theosophical Society resumed its status quo ante ; and H. P. B. and I drafted and the Council put out two circulars, one defining what the Theosophical Society was, the other (dated September, 1878), defining a new body, the " Theosophical Society of the Arya Samaj of Aryavart," as a bridge between the two mother societies, giving in detail the translation of the A. S. rules, etc., and leaving our members perfectly free to join the "link-society," as I called it, and comply with its by laws, or not.  

Our London Branch, which after more than two years of preliminary pourparlers, had formally organised on the 27th June, 1878, under the title of the " British Theo sophical Society,"* issued its first public circular as " The British Theosophical Society of the Arya Samaj of Aryavart.'' If the digression may be excused, I will quote here, for their historical interest, some passages out of my copy of this circular, viz. :

* Under the presidency of the late Dr. Anna Kingsford, the Branch name was changed in the year 1884 to that of the " London Lodge of the Theosophical Society," which it still bears.  

" I. 1 ~e Br;;:jr. Tr-eosophicil S.'cierv is founcec fcr the rurtx'je of d'.50v?ver;nj: tie n.-.:ure .ir.d powers of :ie

" -. The oh;ec: of the S:-o;ety :> to ir.cre.ise the araov.r.t of huz^.ir. he-.Ith, goodriess, k~owled;e, wisdo",

" 5. The r ehowj plecge then-jelve? to endeavour, to the Vest of their vo-.vers, to live .^ life of :e:"reri-oe. tv.rity, and hr,~:hetiy love. They believe in i Great First Intelliient Cause, and in the Divine Sonship of the spirit of man. .md henoe in the intmortality of th..: spirit.

"4. The ^.''oietv is m oonneotton .".nd sympathy -^'ith the Ana Santa; of Arravart, one objeot of which So ciety is to elevate, by a trae spiritn.il education, tn.in kmd out of degenerate, ido-utrous, and impure forms of wcn?hiu, v.herever prevalent."

This 'vas a cle-tr, iranh, .tnd unoh;ection.tMe pro CTan.me, t"~e refeatian rf ti~e tone, thouch not of the ve.tr. In b-oth, the aiuirati.''n for the attainment of spir ilu.-J knowledie through ihe study of natural, espevnuly of occult, phenomena is declared, as irell .'.5 the brotner hood of m.mkind. In drafting the Ne-^York circular :t occurred to me that the membership of. .-.nd supervising entities benind. tne ^ccietv wotnc oe n.itur,t„y irrcupe%iL in three ci^ isi rns, r.r.. nev.members not detached irom. v. ,-r^dlv inieresis : punils. liie myse.i. -vno nan witncra^n fr:m the sanue or v.ere readv to do sc ; one tne adepts themselves, who, without being actually members, were at least connected with us and concerned in our work as a potential agency for the doing of spiritual good to the world. With H. P. B.'s concurrence I defined these three groups, calling them sections, and sub-dividing each into three degrees. This, of course, was in the hope and expectation that we should have more practi cal guidance in adjusting the several grades of members than we had had — or have since had, I may add. In the New York circular. Clause VI. said :

" The objects of the Society are various. It influences its fellows to acquire an intimate knowledge of natural law, especially its occult manifestations."  

Then follow these sentences written by H. P. B. :

" As the highest development, physically and spiritu ally, on earth of the creative cause, man should aim to solve the mystery of his being. He is the procreator of his species, physically, and having inherited the nature of the unknown but palpable cause of his own creation, must possess in his inner, psychical self, this creative power in lesser degree. He should, therefore, study to develop his latent powers, and inform himself respecting the laws of magnetism, electricity, and all other forms of force, whether of the seen or unseen universes."

I then proceed as follows :

" The Society teaches and expects its fellows to per sonally exemplify the highest morality and religious as pirations ; to oppose the materialism of science and every form of dogmatic theology . . . ; to make known, among Western nations the long-suppressed /acZ? about Oriental religious philosophies, their ethics, chronology, esoterism, symbolism . . . ; to disseminate a knowledge of the sublime teachings of that pure esoteric system of the archaic period which are mirrored in the oldest Ve das, and in the philosophy of Gautama Buddha, Zoroas ter, and Confucius ; finally, and chiefly, to aid in the institution of a Brotherhood of Humanity, wherein all good and pure men of every race shall recognise each other as the equal effects (upon this planet) of one Un Create, Universal, Infinite and Everlasting Cause."

The parenthesis (upon this planet) was written in by H. P. B.

The step we were taking in resuming the Society's au tonomy upon discovering the sectarian character of the Arya Samaj, thus drew from us the above categorical declaration of principles, in which, the reader will ob serve, were embraced —

1. The study of occult science ;

2. The formation of a nucleus of universal brother hood ; and

3. The revival of Oriental literature and philosophy. In short, all the three Declared Objects upon which the Theosophical Society has been building itself up during the subsequent seventeen years.  

If our Bombay friends had previously been under the least misapprehension as regards the aims and principles of our Society, the above circular removed the last ex cuse for its continuance.  

The preamble to the Arya Samaj circular issued by us in September, 1878, — three months only before our departure for India — called attention to Pandit Shy.im ji's translation of the Samaj rules, embodied in the cir cular, and said : " The observance of these rules is obligatory only upon such fellows as may voluntarily apply for admission to the Arya Samaj ; the rest will continue to be, as heretofore, unconnected with the special work of the Samaj." It went on to say that our Society, with the design of aiding " in the establishment of a Brotherhood of Humanity, had organised sections (meaning groups) in which room is provided for persons born in the most varied religious faiths, requiring only that applicants shall sincerely wish to learn the sublime truths first written by the Aryans in the Vedas and in different epochs promulgated by sages and seers, and to order their lives accordingly. And also, should they so desire, labour to acquire that control over certain forces of nature which a knowledge of her mysteries imparts to its possessor." The occult training and developments of H. P. B. and her grade of pupils were here hinted at. The phrase shows that tlie chief original motive of the Founders of the Society was to promote this kind of study ; it being their firm conviction that with the de velopment of the psychical powers and spiritual insight, all religious knowledge was attainable, and all igno rant religious dogmatism must vanish. The circular adds that " the Society has thus welcomed, and its mem bers dwell in harmony with Buddhists, I.amaists, Tirah manists, Parsis, Confucianists, and Jews," etc., which was strictly true, applicants from all these religious bodies having already been enrolled as fellows. The incon gruity of this platform with that of the .\rya Saniajis unmistakable and seen at a glance. For Rule :r in Shyamji's version reads :  

" The four texts of the Vedas shall be received and regarded as containing within themselves all that is necessary to constitute them an extraordinary authority in all matters relating to human conduct."

Nothing is said here about any other religious scrip ture being an authority in human conduct, nor any benevolent interest expressed in the religious welfare of non-Yedic peoples ; in short, it is a sectarian body, not eclectic. In saying which I pronounce no opinion as to whether the Samaj is a good or a bad sect, a conserva tive or a progressi\e one, or whether its establishment by the Swami was a blessing or the reverse to India. I simply mean that it is a sect, and that, our Society not being one and standing upon a quite different platform, could not properly be merged by us into the Samaj, although we could be and wished to be friends.

As further showing the arbitranauthority which the Swami claimed and exercised in prescribing which of the S'astras were and were not " authoritative," I quote, from the same Rule 2 of the Arya Samaj, the following :  

"' The Brdhmanas beginning with the Shatapatka ; the six Angas or limbs of the Vedas, beginning with the Shiksha ; the four Upvedas ; th§ six Darshana? or Schools of Philosophy; and the 1,127 Lectures on the Vedas, called Shdkhds, or the branches — these shall be accepted as exponents of the meaning of the Vedas, as well as of the history of the Aryas. So far as these shall concur with the views of the Vedas, they shall be con sidered as ordinary authority."  

Here is defined a sect, a sect of Hinduism, a sect based on the lines traced by its founder. The Swami, it will be seen, in passing, puts himself in opposition to the whole body of orthodox pandits, since he excludes from his list of inspirational books many that are held by them as sacred.

For instance, Smritis are omitted by the Swami, as not being conclusive authorities. But Manu, Chap. II., 10, holds that " Vedas " are " revelations " and " Smritis " (Dharma S'Astras) are " traditions " ; these two are irre futable in all matters, for by these two virtues arose. It is therefore maintained that Smritis must be respected as " authority."

Things remained thus until the arrival of the Found ers in India and their meeting, soon after, with Swami Dyinand at Saharanpur. The chances for our entangle ment in a series of misunderstandings were, of course, greatly enhanced by the necessity for the Swami and our selves having to talk with each other through interpreters, who, however well up in ordinary English, lacked the fluency which would enable them to render correctly our views upon the abstruse questions of philosophy, meta physics, and occult science which had to be discussed.  

We certainly were made to understand that Swami Dya nand's conception of God was that of the Vedantic Parabrahman, hence in accord with our own. Under this mistake — as it afterwards was declared by him to be — I lectured at Meerut to the Arya Samaj in his pres ence, and declared that now all causes of misunder standing had been removed and the two societies were really twins. Yet it was not so : they were no more akin than our Society was with the Brahmo Samaj or any Christian or other sect. Disruption was inevitable, and in due time it came. The Swami, losing his temper, tried to repudiate his own words and acts, and finally turned upon us with abuse and denunciations, and put forth a circular to the public and posted handbills in Bombay to call us charlatans and I do not know what else. This forced us in self-defence to state our case and produce our proofs, and this was done in an extra Supplement to the Theosophist, of date July, 1882, in which all the evidence is cited in full and engraved fac simies are given of an important document bearing the Swami's signature and the certificate of Mr. Seervai, then our Recording Secretary. Thus, after a disturbed relationship of about three years, the two societies were wrenched apart and each went on its own way.

The inherent disruptive elements were (i) My discov ery that the Swami was simply that — i. e., a pandit ascetic — and not an adept at all ; (2) The fact that the Samaj was not standing upon the eclectic platform of the Theo sophical Society ; (3) The Swami's disappointment at our receding from our first consent to accept Harischan dra's bid for the amalganation ; (4) His vexation — ex pressed to me in very strong terms — that I should be helping the Ceylon Buddhists and the Bombay Parsis to know and love their religions better than heretofore, while, as he said, both were false religions. I have also doubted whether his and our intermediary correspond ent, Hurrychund Chintamon, had ever explained to him just what our views and the real platform of our Society were. The subsequent discovery of the fact that he (Hurrychund) had pocketed the Rs. 600-odd sent him by us for the Arya Samaj, and his restitution of tlic money at Bombay under H. P. B.'s compulsion, incline me to the opinion that he deceived both the Swami and ourselves in this respect, and that, but for my getting Shyamji's translation of the Samaj Rules, we should have gone on under the same misapprehension until coming out to India. .

It is quite useless and waste of room for me to pro ceed further in this affair, since those who care for details can find them given at length in the extra Supplement to the Theosophist above mentioned. The Swami was un doubtedly a great man, a learned Sanskrit Pandit, with immense pluck, forca of will and self-reliance — a leader of men. When we first met him, in 1879, he had re cently recovered from an attack of cholera and his physique was more refined and delicate than usual. I thought him strikingly handsome ; tall, dignified in carriage, and gracious in manner towards us, he made a  

CHAPTER XXVI.

MMi:. IJLAVATSKY AT HOME.

HP. B. has been mainly dealt with above in her ^ public capacity ; let us now see how she ap peared in the home.  

But first, does any one know why she so much pre ferred to be called " H. P. B., " and so abhorred the title of " Madame " ? That she should not like to be addressed by the surname Blavatsky, is not so strange when one remembers the facts of that wretched marriage, as given by Mr. Sinnett in his Incidents etc. It brought neither credit nor happiness to her, nor peace to the consort whom she, for a wager, tied to herself, for better for worse. Yet before she would marry the other Mr. B., at Philadelphia, she stipulated that she should not change her surname, and did not, save in the subsequent divorce papers, wherein she styles herself by her second husband's name. The title " Madame " she had a sort of loathing for, as she associated it with a female dog of that name that an acquaintance of hers owned in Paris, and which was specially disliked by her.  

I think the apparent eccentricity of calling herself by her three initials had a deeper significance than has been generally suspected. It meant that the personality of our friend was so blended with those of several of her Masters that, in point of fact, the name she bore but seldom applied to whatever intelligence was momentarily controlling it ; and the Asiatic personage who was speaking to you through her lips was certainly neither Helena, nor the widow of Genl. Blavatsky, nor a woman at all. But each of these shifting personalities contri buted towards the making of a composite entity, the sum of them all and of Helena Petrovna herself, which might as well be designated " H. P. B." as anything else. The case recalls to my mind that of the com posite photograph — an apparently real entity, yet but a blending of a dozen or more — which Sir Francis Galton first brought to our notice in his Inquiry into Human Faculty. My theory may seem untenable, at first sight, by those who did not know her so intimately as myself, yet I incline to the belief that it is the correct one.

The routine of our life at the " Lamasery " was the following. We breakfasted at about 8, dined at 6, and retired at some small hour in the morning, according to our work and its interruption by visitors. H. P. B. lunched at home and I in town, somewhere near my law-office. When we first met I was a very active mem ber of the Lotos Club, but the writing of Isis put an end, once for all, to my connection with clubs and worldly entanglements in general. After breakfast I left for my office and H. P. B. set herself for work at the desk. At dinner, more often than not, we had guests, and we had few evenings alone ; for even if no visitors dropped in, we usually had somebody stopping with us in our apartment. Our house-keeping was of the simplest ; we drank no wine or spirits, and ate but plain food. We had one maid-of-all-work, or rather a procession of them coming and going, for we did not keep one very long. The girl went to her home after clearing away the dinner things, and thenceforward we had to answer the door ourselves. That was not much ; but a more serious affair was to supply tea, with milk and sugar, for a roomful of guests at, say, i a.m., when H. P. B., with lofty disregard of domestic possibilities, would invite herself to take a cup, and in a large way exclaim : " Let 's all have some : what do you say ? " It was useless for me to make gestures of dissent, she would pay no attention. So after sundry fruitless mid night searches for milk or sugar in the neighbourhood, the worm turned, and I put up a notice to this effect :

" TEA."

" Guests will find boiling water and tea in the kitchen, perhaps milk and sugar, and will kindly help themselves."

This was so akin to the Bohemian tone of the whole establishment that nothing was thought of it, and it was most amusing later on to see the habitues getting up quietly and going off to the kitchen to brew tea for themselves. Fine ladies, learned professors, famous artists and journalists, all jocosely became members of our " Kitchen Cabinet," as we called it.

H. P. B. had not even a rudimentary notion of house keeping. Once, wishing boiled eggs, she laid the raw eggs on the live coals ! Sometimes our maid would walk off on a Saturday evening and leave us to shift as we might for the day's meals. Then was it H. P. B. who catered and cooked ? Nay, verily, but her poor colleague. She would either sit and write and smoke cigarettes, or come into the kitchen and bother. In my Diary for 1878, I find this in the entry for April 12 : " The servant ' vamosed the ranch ' without preparing dinner ; so the Countess L. P. turned in and helped me by making an excellent salad. Besides her, we had O'Donovan to dinner." He was a rare chap, that Irish man ; a sculptor of marked talent, an excellent com panion, with a dry humour that was irresistible. H. P. B. was very fond of him and he of her. He modelled her portrait from life in a medallion, which was cast in bronze, and which is in my possession. What he may be now I know not, but at that time he was fond of a glass of good whiskey (if any whiskey may be called good), and once made a roomful roar with laughter by a repartee he gave to one of the company present. They were drinking together, and the person in question after tasting his glass, put it down with the exclamation, " Pah ! what bad whiskey that is ! " O'Donovan, turn ing to him with solemn gravity, laid a hand upon his arm and said : " Don't, don't say that. There is no bad whiskey, but some is better than other." He was a Roman Catholic by birth, though nothing in particular, it appeared, in actual belief. But, seeing how hot and angry H. P. B. would always get when Roman Catholicism was mentioned, he used to pretend that he believed that that creed would eventually sweep Buddhism, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism from the face of the earth. Although he played this trick on her twenty times, H. P. B. was invariably caught again in the trap whenever O'Donovan set it for her. She would fume and swear, and call him an incurable idiot and other pet names, but to no pur pose : he would sit and smoke in dignified silence, with out changing face, as if he were listening to a dramatic recitation in which the speaker's own feelings had no share. When she had talked and shouted herself out of breath, he would slowly turn his head towards some neighbour and say : " She speaks well, does n't she ; but she don't believe that ; it is only her repartee. She will be a good Catholic some day." And then, when H. P. B. ex ploded at this crowning audacity, and made as if to throw something at him, he would slip away to the kitchen and make himself a cup of tea ! I have known him bring friends there just to enjoy this species of bear-baiting ; but H. P. B. never nourished malice, and after relieving herself of a certain number of objurgations, would be as friendly as ever with her inveterate teazer.

One of our frequent and most appreciated visitors was Prof. Alexander Wilder, a quaint personality, the type of the very large class of self-educated American yeomanry ; men of the forceful quality of the Puritan Fathers ; men of brain and thought, intensely inde pendent, very versatile, very honest, very plucky and patriotic. Prof. AVilder and I have been friends since before the Rebellion, and I have always held him in the highest esteem. His head is full of knowledge, which he readily imparts to appreciative listeners. He is not a college-bred or city-bred man, I fancy, but if one wants sound ideas upon the migration of races and sym bols, the esoteric meaning of Greek philosophy, the value of Hebrew or Greek texts, or the merits and de merits of various schools of medicine, he can give them as well as the most finished graduate. A tall, lank man of the Lincoln type, with a noble, dome-like head, thin jaws, grey hair, and language filled with quaint Saxon Americanisms. He used to come and talk by the hour with H. P. B., often lying recumbent on the sofa, with — as she used to say — " one long leg resting on the chandelier, the other on the mantel-piece." And she, as stout as he was thin, as voluble as he was sententious and epigram matic, smoking innumerable cigarettes and brilliantly sustaining her share of the conversation. She got him to write out many of his ideas to use in Isis, and they will be found there quoted. The hours would slip by without notice until he sometimes found himself too late for the last train to Newark, and would have to stop in town all night. I think that, of all our visitors, he cared about the least of all for H. P. B.'s psychical phe nomena : he believed in their scientific possibility and did not doubt her possession of them, but philosophy was his idol, and the wonders of mediumship and adept ship interested him only in the abstract.

Yet some of H. P. B.'s phenomena were strange enough, in all conscience. Besides those heretofore described, I find mention of others in my Diary, among them this curious one :

I met one day in the lower part of the city (New York) an acquaintance with whom I stopped for a few moments to chat. He was very prejudiced against H. P. B., and spoke very harshly against her, keeping to his opinion despite all I could say. At last he used such objec tionable language that, in sheer disgust, I hastily left him and went on my way. I got home as usual in time for dinner, and went to my room — the one marked " G " on the plan given in Chapter XXIV. was then my sleeping apartment — to make my toilet. H. P. B. came along the passage to the open door, and from thence bade me good evening. The washing-stand was in the N. W. corner, opposite the door, and the " hard-finished " white wall above it uncovered with pictures or anything. Af ter finishing my washing I turned toward the shaving stand, behind me and just in front of the window, to brush my hair, when I saw something of a green colour reflected in the glass. A second glance showed it to be a sheet of green paper with writing upon it, and to be attached to the wall just over the washing-stand where I had the moment before been occupied without seeing anything save the blank wall before my eyes. I found the paper attached to the plastering by pins at the four corners, and the writing to be a number of Oriental texts from Dhammapada and Sfltras, written in a pecu liar style and signed at the lower corner by one of the Masters. The verses were reproaches to my address for having allowed H. P. B. to be reviled without defending her ; unmistakably referring to my encounter down town with the person I had met, although no names were men tioned. I had not been five minutes in the house since my return, had spoken to nobody about the incident, nor exchanged with any one in the house more than the few words of greeting with H. P. B. from the door of my room. In fact, the incident had passed out of my mind. This is one of those phenomena of the higher class which involve the power of thought-reading, or clairaudience at a distance, and either that of producing written documents without contact, or of writing them in the ordinary way, attaching them to the wall before my return home, and then inhibiting my sight so as to make them invisible for the moment, but visible the next instant by the restoration to me of my normal vision.

This seems the more probable explanation of the two, yet, even then see how fine is the phenomenon, first, in the clairaudience at the distance of three miles, and then in the inhibition of my sight without arousing the slightest suspicion in my mind of the trick being played upon me. I had carefully kept this green paper until 1891, when it was with me on my round-the-world tour, and was appropriated by somebody without my permis sion. I should be glad to recover it. Another produc tion of H. P. B.'s has disappeared along with it. It is a caricature representing my supposed ordeal of initiation into the school of adepts, and a most comical picture it is. In the lower foreground I stand with a Hindu fe/i/a (turban) as my only article of dress, undergoing a cate chetical examination by Master K. H. In the lower right-hand corner a detached hand holds in space a bottle of spirits, and a bony bayadere, who looks like a starved Irish peasant in a time of potato-blight, is dan cing a J>as de fascination. In the upper corner H. P. B., wearing a New Jersey sunhood and "Deccanee men's turn-up shoes, and carrying a bell-shaped umbrella with a flag marked " Jack " streaming from its point, bestrides an elephant and holds out a mammoth hand to " control the elements " for my helping, while another Master stands beside the elephant watching my ordeal. A funny little elemental in a cotton night cap and holding a lighted candle, says, " My stars ! what 's that ? " from a perch on K. H.'s shoulder, and a series of absurd questions and answers written below my Interrogator's book, com plete the nonsensical satire. From this description the reader may judge of the joviality of H. P. B.'s tempera ment at that period, and of the kindly license allowed us in our dealings with the Teachers. The mere thought of such irreverence will doubtless make cold chills to run down the spines of some of H. P. B.'s latest pupils. I do not know how I could better illustrate this joyous exhuberance of hers than by quoting the expression used by a Hartford reporter in writing to his paper. " Ma dame laughed," he writes. " When we write Madame laughed, we feel as if we were saying Laughter was pres ent ! for of all clear, mirthful, rollicking laughter that we ever heard, hers is the very essence. She seems, indeed, the Gcitius of the mood she displays at all times so intense is her vitality." This was the tone of our house hold ; and her mirthfulness, epigrammatic wit, briliance of conversation, caressing friendliness to those she liked or wanted to have like her, fund of anecdote and, chief est attraction to most of her callers, her amazing psychical phenomena — made the " Lamasery " the most attractive salon of the metropolis from 1876 to the close of 1878.

A very interesting phenomenon is that of duplication of objects, the making of two or more out of one. I have given some instances above, and here is another which was described in the New York correspondence of the Hartford Daily Times of December 2, 1878. The correspondent passes an evening with us and meets a num ber of other visitors, from one of whom, an English artist, he gets the following story of what he saw H. P. B. do : " I know it will seem incredible to you, my dear fellow," said my friend, " for it does to me as I look back upon it ; }et, at the same time, I know my senses could not have deceived me. Besides, another gentleman was with me at the time. I have seen Madame create things." " Create things ! " I cried. " Yes, create things, — produce them from nothing. I can tell you of two instances. " Madame, my friend, and myself were out one day looking about the stores, when she said she desired some of these illuminated alphabets which come in sheets, like the painted sheets of little birds, flowers, animals, and other figures, so popular for decorating pottery and vases. She was making a scrap-book, and wished to arrange her title page in these pretty colored letters. Well, we hunted everywhere but could not find any, until at last we found just one sheet, containing the twenty-six letters, somewhere on Sixth Avenue. Madame bought that one and we went home. She wanted several, of course, but not finding them proceeded to use what she could of this. My friend and I sat down beside her little table, while she got out her scrap-book and busily began to paste her letters in. By and bye she exclaimed, petulantly, ' I want two S's, two P's, and two A's.' I said, ' Madame, I will go and search for them down town. I presume I can find them somewhere.'  

" ' No you need not,' she answered. Then, suddenly looking up, said, ' Do you wish to see me make some ? '

" ' Make some ? How ? Paint some ? ' No, make some exactly like these.'

"'But how is that possible? These are printed by machinery.'

" ' It is possible — see ! '

" She put her finger upon the S and looked upon it. She looked at it with infinite intensity. Her brow ridged out. She seemed the very spirit of will. In about half a minute she smiled, lifted her finger, took up two S's exactly alike, exclaiming, ' It is done ! ' She did the same with the P's.

■' Then my friend thought : ' It" this is trickery, it can be detected. In one alphabet can be but one letter of a kind. I will try her.' So he said : ' Madame, supposing this time, instead of mating two letters separately, you join them together, thus A — A — ?'

" ' It makes no difference to me how I do it," she re plied indifferently, and placing her finger on the A, in a few seconds she took it up, and handed him two A's, joined together as he desired.

frr"; ih^samr f-iiw cf paS-r. There were no seams or (cxrtificial) joinings of any kind. She had to cut them apart to use tlieni. This was in broad dayliglu, in the presence of no one but myself and friend, and done simply for her own convenience.

" We were both astounded and lost in admiration. We examined these with the utmost c.ire. They seemed as much alike as two peas. But if you wish, I can show vou the letters this moment. ' Madame, may we take vour scrap-book to look at ? '

" ■ Certainly, with pleasure,' returned Madame, courte ouslv. We waited impatiently until Mr. P. could open the volume. The page was beautifully .Txranged, and read thus, in brilliant ler.ers :

■' Third Volume, Scrap-book of the Theosophic.^l S.">CIETY.

 

" ' There,' said he, pointing to the S in Scrap and the S in Society, ' those are the letters she used, and this is the one she made.' There was no difference in them."*

* The reporter, it seems, trusted to his memory, and omitted copying down at the time the words of the inscription which — being before me at this moment — I find to read as follows : " Ante and post natal history of the Theosophical Society, and of the mortifica tions, tribulations and triumphs of its Fellows." The letters H. P. B. duplicated are the S's in "History," "Theosophical" and "So ciety," two of them having been made out of the third ; the P'sare in " Post" and " Triumphs," and of a smaller size than the S's. She seems to have quietly duplicated several other letters, for I find no less than eight A's besides other duplicates. There was nothing out of the common in the furnish ing and decoration of our apartment save in the dining room and work-room — which was at the same time our reception-room and library all in one — and they were certainly quaint enough. The dead wall of the dining room which separated it from H. P. B.'s bed-room was entirely covered with a picture in dried forest leaves, representing a tropical jungle scene. An elephant stood, ruminating beside a pool of water, a tiger was springing at him from the back-ground, and a huge serpent was coiled around the trunk of a palm tree. A very good representation of it is given on p. 205 of Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly for February, 1892 ; although the pic ture of the room, the Hindu servant bringing in the roast, and the dining party at table drinking wine, is ridiculously inaccurate. The room was not like the picture ; we had no Hindu servant ; we did not have a drop of wine or spirits in the house ; our furniture was   totally different from the artist's sketch of it. I have never heard of another wall-picture of the sort men tioned, and it seemed to strike all our guests as entirely appropriate in such a home as the " Lamasery." The whole forest scene grew out of the covering with autumn leaves, of a figure of an elephant cut from brown paper. I made another similar invention in the work-room. The entrance-door was in an angle made by cutting off a corner, and above it the wall formed a square of per haps 4 X 5 ft. One day I found at a curiosity-shop a splendidly mounted lioness-head ; the eyes glaring, the jaws wide open, the tongue retracted, the teeth white and menacing. On getting it home and looking around for a place to put it, this square of wall struck my eye, and there I hung my trophy. By an arrangement of long, dried grasses, I made it seem as though an angry lioness were creeping through the jungle and ready to spring upon the visitors who chanced to look up at her. It was one of our jokes to have new-comers seated in an easy chair that faced the door, and enjoy their start when their eyes wandered from H. P. B. to glance around the room. If the visitor chanced to be a hysteri cal old maid who screamed on seeing the trophy, H. P. B. would laugh heartily. In two corners of the room I stood palm-fronds that touched the ceiling and bent over their tips in graceful curves ; little stuffed monkeys peered out over the curtain cornices ; a fine stuffed snake lay on top of the mantel mirror, hanging its head over one corner ; a large stuffed baboon, decked out with a collar, white cravat and pair of my spectacles, carrying under one arm the manuscript of a lecture on " Decent of Species," and dubbed " Professor Fiske," stood upright in a corner ; a fine large grey owl sat perched on a bookcase ; a toy lizard or two crawled up the wall ; a Swiss cuckoo clock hung to the left of the chimney breast ; small Japanese cabinets, carved wooden images of Lord Buddha and a Siamese talapoin, curios of sorts and kinds, occupied the top of the cottage piano, wall brackets, corner 6tageres and other con venient spaces ; a long writing table took up the centre of the room ; some book shelves with our scanty library rose above its farther end, between the two Eighth Avenue windows ; and chairs and a divan or two filled up the floor space, so that one had to pick one's way to get to the farther end of the chamber. A hanging four light gas chandelier with a drop-light over the table gave us the necessary physical illumination ; the other, H. P. B. supplied. A pair of sliding glass doors (seldom closed) divided the work-room from her little bed-room, and on the wall over the doors we constructed a huge double triangle of thin punched steel sheets. Altogether the room was very artistic and pleasing to its occupants and guests, the theme of many a description in news papers and talk among our friends. No frame could have been more appropriate for setting off the bizarre personahty of its mysterious occupant, H. P. B. Many were the pen sketches of the room that appeared in the American papers of the day ; among them the following by the same correspondent of the Hartford paper, from whose interesting letters the above extracts were copied :

" Madame was seated in her little work-room and parlor, all in one, and we may add her curiosity-shop as well, for never was apartment more crammed with odd, elegant, old, beautiful, costly, and apparently worthless things, than this. She had cigarette in mouth, and scis sors in hand, and was hard at work clipping paragraphs, articles, items, criticisms, and other matter, from heaps of journals from all parts of the world, relating to her self, to her book, to the Theosophical Society, to any and everything connected with her life-work and aims.

She waved us to a seat, and while she intently read some article we had a chance to observe the walls and fur niture of this New York Lamasery. Directly in the centre stood a stuffed ape, with a white ' dickey ' and necktie around his throat, manuscript in paw, and spectacles on nose. Could it be a mute satire on the clergy ?*

* No, on the materialistic scientists. — H. S. O.  

Over the door was the stuffed head of a lion ess, with open jaws and threatening aspect ; the eyes glaring with an almost natural ferocity. A god in gold occupied the centre of the mantelpiece ; Chinese and Japanese cabinets, fans, pipes, implements, and rugs, low divans and couches, a large desk, a mechanical bird which sang as mechanically, albums, scrap-books, and the inevitable cigarette-holders, papers, and ash-pots, made the loose rich robe in which the Madame was apparelled seem in perfect harmony with her surroundings. A rare,  strange countenance is hers. A combination of moods seems to constantly play over her features. She never seems quite absorbed by one subject. There is a keen, alert, subtle undercurrent of feeling and perception per ceivable in the expression of her eyes. It impressed us then, and has invariably, with the idea of a double per sonality : as if she were here, and not here ; talking and yet thinking, or acting far away. Her hair, light, very thick, and naturally waved, has not a grey thread in it. Her skin, evidently somewhat browned by exposure to sea and sun, has no wrinkles ; her hands and arms are as delicate as a girl's. Her whole personality is expressive of self-possession, command, and a certain sangfroid which borders on masculine indifference, without for a moment overstepping the bounds of womanly delicacy." It has been remarked above, if I remember, that what made a visit to the Lamasery so piquant, was the chance that on any given occasion the visitor might see H. P. B. do some wonder in addition to amusing, delighting, or edifying him or her with her witty and vivacious talk. In a pause in the conversation, perhaps a guest would hold up a finger, say " Hush ! " and then, all listening in breathless silence, musical notes would be heard in the air. Sometimes they would sound faintly far away in the distance, then coming nearer and gaining volume until the elfin music would float around the room, near the ceiling, and finally die away again in a lost chord and be succeeded by silence. Or it might be that H. P. B. would fling out her hand with an imperious gesture and ping ! ping ! would come, in the air whither she pointed, the silvery tones of a bell. Some people fancy that she must have had a concealed bell under her dress for play ing her tricks ; but the answer to that is that, not only I but others, have, after dinner, before rising from the table, arranged a series of finger-glasses and tumblers, with various depths of water in them to cause them to give out different notes when struck, and then tapping their edges with a lead-pencil, a knife-blade, or some other thing, have had her duplicate in space every note drawn from the " musical glasses." No trick bell worked beneath a woman's skirts would do that. Then, again, how often have people been present when she would lay her hand on a tree-trunk, a house wall, a clock case, a man's head, or wherever else she might be asked to try it, and cause the fairy bell to ring within the substance of the solid body she had her hands in contact with. I was with her at Mr. Sinnett's house at Simla when, all of us standing on the veranda, she made the musical sounds to come towards us on the air of the starlit night, from across the dark valley into which descended the hill slope on which the house was built. And I was present when she made a bell to ring inside the head of one of the greatest of the Anglo-Indian civilians, and another to sound inside the coat pocket of another very high civil ian at the other side of the room from where she sat.

She never could give any satisfactory scientific expla nation of the modus operandi. One day when she and I were alone and talking of it, she said : " Now, see here ; you are a great whistler ; how do you form instanta neously any given note you wish to produce ? " I re plied that I could not exactly say how I did it, except that a certain arrangement of the lips and compres sion of air within the mouth, the knack of which had been acquired by many years of practice, caused each note to sound simultaneously with the act of my thinking of it. "Well now, tell me : when you would sound a note do you think that, to produce it, you must put your lips, compress your breath, and work your throat-muscles in certain prescribed ways, and then proceed to do it?" " Not at all," I said ; " long habit had made the mus cular and pneumatic actions automatic." " Well, then, that 's just the thing : I think of a note ; automatically or instinctively I work the astral currents by my trained will ; I send a sort of cross-current out from my brain to a certain point in space, where a vortex is formed between this current and the great current flowing in the astral light according to the earth's motion, and in that vortex sounds out the note I think. Just, you see, as the note you mean to whistle sounds in the air-tube formed by your lips, when you put them into the right position, work your lip and throat-muscles in the right way, and force your breath to rush out of this channel or lip-orifice. It is impossible for me to explain any better. I can do it, but can't tell you how I do it. Now try any notes you please and see if I cannot imitate them." I struck a note out of one of the tumblers at random, and instantly its echo, as if the soul of it ring ing in Fairyland, would sound in the air ; sometimes just overhead, now in this corner, now in that. She sometimes missed the exact note, but when I told her so she would ask me to sound it again, and then the note would be exactly reflected back to us out of the A'kisha.

In connection with the above read what Mrs. Speer says (JLight, January 28, 1893) about the musical sounds that used to accompany M. A. Oxon.

September igth. — Before meeting this evening we heard the ' fairy bells ' playing in different parts of the garden where we were walking ; at times they sounded far off, seemingly playing at the top of some high elm trees, music and stars mingling together, then they would approach nearer to us, eventually following us into the sdance-room, which opened on to the lawn. After we were seated the music still lingered with us, playing in the corners of the room, and then over the table round which we were sitting. They played scales and chords by request, with the greatest rapidity, and copied notes Dr. S. made with his voice. After Mr. S. M. was en tranced the music became louder and sounded like bril liant playing on the piano. There was no instrument in that room."

The musical phenomena were evidently identical with those of H. P. B., but with the radical difference that she produced the sounds at will, while in Stainton Moseyn's case they were beyond his control and most brilliant when his body was entranced. The Speer Circle had a great deal of these " fairy bells" first and last, and, some very unconvincing theories given by the spirits to ac count for them. For instance, Benjamin Franklin's alleged spirit told them {Light, March 18, 1893, p. 130) that " the sound you call fairy bells represents a spirit instrument, one used in the spheres." Yet he adds : " We could do much more for you had our medium a musical organisation, but it is a bad one for music." Why, if it were to be drawn from an instrument ? That is almost like saying that Thalberg or Paderevsky could play their instrument better if the gasman of the build ing were not deaf in one ear ! We may safely deny the " spirit-instrument " theory, for we have the explanation in the fact that the more musical the temperament of the medium naturally, the more melodious the fairy bells can be made to jingle in his presence. Moreover, in the case of a medium, the more deeply he is plunged into trance, the nearer and clearer may be the tintinnabula tion of the bells, bells, bells !  

CHAPTER XXVII.

ILLUSIONS.

THE elemental messenger of H. P. B. once rang the fairy bell with pathetic effect, at the moment when her pet canary died. It is fixed indelibly in my memory from the fact that it is associated with the recollection of H. P. B.'s feeling of genuine sorrow. It was just an ordinary little hen canary, not much to look at for beauty, but an amazingly industrious housewife ; lovable be cause so evidently honest. I forget where we got her, but think H. P. B. brought her from Philadelphia and that I bought her mate — a splendid singer — in New York. No matter ; we had them a long time and they came to be almost like children, as it were. We used to let them fly about the room at their pleasure, and the male bird would reward us by perching on a picture-frame near our work-table and singing most melodiously. The hen would light upon our table in the most fearless way, walk, chirping, right under our noses, and pick up and carry away for nest-building near the ceiling, up in the bronze ornament on the chandelier pipe, any ends of twine or other likely materials. She seemed especially to value the long thin snippings of paper cut off by H. P. B. when pasting and readjusting her foolscap MSS. sheets. Little " Jenny " would sometimes wait until her mistress had cut off a piece of paper and dropped it on the table or floor, and then hop to it and carry it off, to the approving song of her handsome husband, " Pip." There was a Turkish carpet with fringed ends on the floor, and this gave Jenny all she could do. The little creature would take one of the strands in her beak, brace herself square upon her feet, and then lean back and tug and jerk with all her might, trying in vain to get it loose.

The nest-building was finished at last, and then Jenny began sitting up aloft over our table, her little head showing beyond the edge of the bronze cup, or orna ment, on the gas-pipe. Pip sang his sweetest, and we waited for the hatching out of the eggs with pleasurable interest. The weeks passed on and Jenny still sat and we waited, but no young birds twittered, and we won dered what could be up. At last one day when the bird was away after seed and water, I placed a chair on our writing-table, H. P. B. held it, and I mounted for a peep. The nest was absolutely empty, neither fledgling there nor shell, whether full or broken : we had been fooled by our busy little canary-hen. H. P. B. gave the only possible explanation by saying that " Jenny had been sitting on her illusions " ; that is, she had persuaded   herself that she had laid eggs, and that it was her duty to hatch them out !

All went well with us and the birds for many months, but at last our quartette was broken up by the death of Jenny. She was found lying at her last gasp on her back in her cage. I took her out and placed her in H. P. B.'s hand, and we mourned together over our pet. H. P. B. kissed her, gently stroked her plumage, tried to restore her vitality by magnetic breathing, but noth ing availed ; the bird's gasps grew feebler and feebler, until we saw it could only be a question of minutes. Then the stern, granite-faced H. P. B. melted into ten derness, opened her dress, and laid little Jenny in her bosom ; as if to give her life by placing her near the heart that was beating in pity for her. But it was use less ; there came a last gasp, a last flutter of the birdie's heart, and then ? Then, sharp and sweet and clear in the A'kasha near us, rang out a fairy bell, the requiem of the passing life ; and H. P. B. wept for her dead bird.

Speaking of the possibilities of Mdya, shall we clas sify in that category the following phenomenon ? One day, in moving about at the table, H. P. B. sent a huge splotch of ink over a light lawn wrapper that she was wearing. There must have been a teaspoonful of the fluid and it ran in a dozen streams down the front of the skirt to the floor. The dress was ruined. I shall drop a veil over the remarks that were eHcited from her, merely saying that they were strong rather than poetical. Yet she soon showed me that the evil was not remediless,   for, stepping towards her bedroom, but without crossing the threshold, she turned her back to me and went to passing her hands over the whole dress, or so much of it as she could reach ; and in another moment turning towards me, lo ! the light spotted wrapper had disap peared and she stood there clothed in one of a chocolate colour. Was this a Maya ? If so, when will a Miya wear out ? For she wore the brown dress until it had had its turn of use, and I never saw the light one again. She told me once in great glee of a Maya that had been put off on herself. She was travelling in the desert, she said, with a certain Coptic white magician who shall be nameless, and, camping one evening, expressed the ardent wish for a cup of good French cafi au lait. "Well, certainly, if you wish it so much," said the guardian guide. He went to the baggage-camel, drew water from the skin, and after awhile returned, bringing in his hand a cup of smoking, fragrant coffee mixed with milk. H. P. B. thought this, of course, was a phenome nal production, since her companion was a high adept and possessed of very great powers. So she thanked him gratefully, and drank, and was delighted, and de clared she had never tasted better coffee at the Cafd de Paris. The magician said nothing, but merely bowed pleasantly and stood as if waiting to receive back the cup. H. P. B. sipped the smoking beverage, and chat ted merrily, and — but what is this ? The coffee has disappeared and naught but plain water remains in her cup ! It never was anything else ; she had been drink   ing and smelling and sipping the Maya of hot, fragrant IMocha. Of course, it will be said that such an illusion as that may be seen at any tr.ivelling mesmeriser's show, where parafine oil is made to taste hke chocolate and vinegar like honey. But there is the difference that the illusion in the case of H. P. B. was produced in silence, by simple thought-transference, and upon a subject who herself had the power of casting glamours over third persons. From the crude mesmeric experimentation in a village hall, for paj-, to the highest example of maya\ic glamour thrown silently upon one person or a crowd bv an Eastern juggler, fakir, sanyasi, or adept, it is but a difference in degree. One principle runs throughout all these and all other phenomena, the observ'ation of which is the function of the bodity senses. Whether the Mayabe induced from without by the spoken word, the suggestive gesture, or the silent will of another, or it be self-engen dered by the deceived imagination acting through the will upon the senses, it is all one, and he who thoroughly masters the rationale of the show of the village show man and the naked Indian juggler, will be able to grasp the theor)' of Maya on a cosmic scale. When one is living in daily association with a person who possesses tliis power of casting glamour at will over one, the thought becomes most burdensome after awhile, for one never knows whether what is apparently spoken or seen is reallv so or not. Not even such a visit as the one made me by the Mahatma, with the concomitants of his touching me and speaking to me, and my feeling him as   a man of substantial body like myself, would really be proof that I was not under a glamour at the time. It will be remembered that this train of thought came up in my mind during the course of our conversation, and when we were about to part, and that the Mahatma smilingly gave me the test I wanted by leaving his tur ban, a tangible cotton cloth with his cryptograph worked on it, on my table.

How much we read in folk-lore tales about " fairy gold " and " fairy jewels " which by the next dawn are found turned into bits of twigs, leaves, straw, or other rubbish ! Such stories one finds current in almost every land and among every people. I have heard them in India. In such cases the principle of Mdya is illustrated ; but it would seem, from the instance I gave of the Mahatma refunding the half-dollar I had spent for the drawing materials with which his portrait was to be made for me, that the same person who could make the Maya of money at will, might also be able to either create real coin, or by the law of apport, bring it to one from some distant place where it lay at the moment.

A CORNER OF A MAHATMA'S TURBAN. The production of the two Chinese or Japanese pic tures of ladies was glamour, and so was the following case. The Hon. J. L. O'Sullivan, formerly U. S. Min ister to Portugal, of whom mention has been made above, was calling one day, when the conversation turned upon the phenomenon of duplication. I had brought home that afternoon a bank-note for $i,ooo and had given it to H. P. B, to keep for me. She produced this note  from her drawer, gave it to Mr. O'Sullivan to hold, rolled up, in his hand. Presently she told him to open his hand and see what he would find. He did so, and unrolling the bank-note found inside it another, its exact duplicate in paper, serial number, and face and back plate-printing. " Well," he exclaimed, " this is a famous way to become rich ! " " No, indeed," answered H. P. B., " 't is but a psychological trick. We, who have the power of doing this, dare not use it for our own or any other's interest, any more than you would dare to commit the forgery by the methods of the counterfeiter. It would be stealing from the Government in either case." She refused to satisfy our curiosity as to how she effected the duplication, telling us with a laugh to find out if we could. The two notes were laid away in the drawer, and when our visitor had departed, she showed me that but the original one remained ; the duplicate had dis solved again.

Shortly before we left New York, H. P. B. went out with me one evening to shop for herself. The purchases amounted to fifty dollars, and as she had no money at all at the time, I paid the bills and took charge of the receipts. As we were about entering the door of our house, she let go my arm, took my hand, and thrust some bank-notes in it saying ; " There are your fifty dollars ! " I repeat, that she had no money of her own, and no visitor coming to the house from whom she could have borrowed it : nor, when we left the house, did she know what she would buy nor how much she would   spend. She simply had money when she actually needed it and when it was right that she should have it. For example : I was once asked to go to a certain city and undertake some work for the Mahatmas, which had very important possibilities hanging upon its doing. I esti mated that it would take me at least one or two months, and, as I was paying the " Lamasery " expenses and had other large demands upon my purse, I told H. P. B. frankly that I could not afford to spend the time away from New York. " Very well," she said, " do as you think right ; you are not yet a pledged neophyte and the Brothers have not the smallest right to take you away from your business." Still, I could not bear the idea of refusing the least thing that the Teachers should ask me, and although I could not see how I would have enough coming in for my wants while absent, I finally said that I would go, at any cost. H. P. B. asked me what I should probably lose by going, and I told her that at the very lowest calculation it would be not less than $500 a month. I went, and did not return until well into the second month. On going to the bank to see what money I had to my credit, I was astounded on being told that the sum was just a thousand dollars more than I could account for. Was not the book-keeper mis taken ? No, it was so and so much. Then I asked him if he could recollect the appearance of the person who had, it seemed, made two deposits of $500 each to the credit on my account. He fortunately could, because the man was of so strange an appearance : he was very   tall, with long black hair rolling on his shoulders, pierc ing black eyes, and brown complexion : an Asiatic, in short. The same man had made both the deposits, merely handing in the money and asking that it might be placed to my credit. He did not have my pass-book, and he asked the Receiving Teller to fill up the deposit ticket himself as " he could not write English." Sup posing H. P. B. to have had the friends she had years later in India and Europe, it would not have been at all remarkable if she had got one of them to lend her the money to make good my deficit, but at that time there was not a person of her acquaintance but myself, from whom she could have borrowed even one hundred dollars, much less one thousand.

Then, again, at Bombay, she always had money given her when it was badly needed. When we landed there was barely enough to pay our current household ex penses a few months ahead, let alone to squander on luxuries or superfluities ; yet she and I started off to the Punjab, with Moolji and Baboola, on that memorable journey which she expanded into her vivid romance, Caves and 'yungles of Hindustan and spent about two thousand rupees without being the worse for it. The cruse of oil and measure of meal were never exhausted, because we were given what we required by the Masters whose work we were doing. When I asked how it was possible for this to be when the Masters were living out side the world of money-making and money-getting H. P. B. told me that they were the guardians over un   told wealth of mines and buric-d treasure and jewels which, according to the Karma attaching to them, could he employed for the f^ood of mankind through many different agencies. Sonie of these treasures were, how ever, so befouled with the aura, of crime that if suffereil to be dug up and ( ircuhiled l)efor(; Ihe delails of the law of Karma had worked tliemselves out, tliey wouhl breed fresh crimes and more direful human misery. Again, the Karma of some individuals re'inired that tlicy should, as if by the merest accident, discover Imricd pots of money or other valuables, or attract to themselves in the way of business, fortunes greater or less. These effects of com pensation were worked out by the c'leinentajs of the min eral kingdom with whom — according to ICastern belief theapparent ])ets of fortune were closely albed through the elementals preponderating in their own temperaments.  

This question of the existence of 1 lemental spirits has always been the crux with the Spiritualists, yet Mrs. Britten, one of their chi(;fs, rlc-clares (see /tanner 0/ Light) that " sriK knows of the existence of other than human spirits, and has seen apparitions of spiritual or elementary existent.e, <;voked by cabalistic words and practices.'' The Hon. A. Aksakof, moreover, states that " Prince A. Oolgorouki, the gn-at authority on Mesmer ism, has written me that he has ascertairied that spirits which play the most jirorninent part at s(^ances arcele mentaries — gnomes, etc. His clairvoyants have seen them and describe them thus." Spi. Set., ] December, ifi75. (T. .S. Scrap-Book, I, 92.)  

To resume, then, the hand of such an individual, hav ing in him a preponderance of the elementals belonging to the natural kingdom of minerals and metals, like that of Midas, King of Phrygia, would have that magic prop erty that " everything he touches turns to gold " ; and no matter how stupid he might be as to general affairs, his " luck " would be constant and irresistible. So, too, with a preponderance of the watery elementals, he would be attracted to the life of a sailor and stick to it despite all hardships and sufferings. So, also, the preponderance of the elementals of the air in a man's temperament would set him, as a child, to climbing trees and house roofs, as a man, to mountaineering, ballooning, walking the tight-rope at dizzy heights, and otherwise trying to get above the earth's surface. H. P. B. told me various stories to illustrate this principle, which need not be quoted here, since human life teems with examples that may be comprehended upon testing them with the key above given. As regards the Theosophical Society, I may say that, while neither H. P. B. nor I were ever al lowed to have a superfluity, we were never left to suffer for the necessaries of our life and work. Over and over again, twenty, fifty times have I seen our cash-box nearly emptied and the prospects ahead very discouraging in the pecuniary sense, yet as invariably have I received in remittances from some quarter or another, what was needed, and our work has never been stopped for a single day for lack of means to carry on the Head quarters.

  Yet the agent of the unseen Masters is often disquali fied for judging whether it is or is not necessary for the success of his public work that he should have money coming in to himself. When H. P. B. was ordered from Paris to New York in 1873, she soon found herself in the most dismal want, having, as stated in a previous chapter, to boil her coffee-dregs over and over again for lack of pence for buying a fresh supply ; and to keep off starvation, at last had to work with her needle for a maker of cravats. She got no presents from unexpected sources, found no fairy-gold on her mattress on waking in the morning. The time was not yet. But, although she was in such stark poverty herself, she had lying in her trunk for some time after her arrival a large sum of money (I think something like 23,000 francs) which had been confided to her by the Master, to await orders. The order finally came to her to go to Buffalo. Where that was or how to reach it, she had not the remotest idea until she enquired : What to do at Buffalo ? " No matter what : take the money with you." On reaching her des tination she was told to take a hack and drive to such an address, and give the money to such and such a person ; to make no explanations, but to take his receipt and come away. She did so : the man was found at the address given, and found in peculiar conditions. He was writing a farewell letter to his family, with a loaded pistol on the table with which he would have shot him self in another half hour if H. P. B. had not come. It seems — as she told me subsequently — that this was a   most worthy man who had been robbed of the 23,000 francs in some peculiar way that made it necessary, for the sake of events that would subsequently happen as a consequence — events of importance to the world — that he should have the money restored to him at a particular crisis, and H. P. B. was the agent deputed to this act of beneficence. When we met she had entirely forgotten the man's name, his street and number. Here we have a case where the very agent chosen to carry the money to the beneiiciary was herself in most necessitous cir cumstances, yet not permitted to use one franc of the trust fund to buy herself a pound of fresh coffee.

 

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