It will be advisable, however, to distinguish that part of the narrative for which Miss Vaughan is admittedly and personally responsible from that which she claims to be derived from her family history. I must distinguish between them, not that I am prepared to admit as a legitimate consequence of her statement that there is any real difference or that I unquestionably regard Miss Vaughan as having created a strong presumption that she is in possession of the documents which she claims to have. I am simply recognising the classification which she may herself be held to make. If in this respect it can be shown that I have mistaken the actual position, I will make such reparation as may be due from a man of letters, whose reasonable indignation in the midst of much imposture will, in such case, have misled him. But there is only one course which is open to Miss Vaughan in the matter, and that is to produce the original documents on which she has based her narrative for the opinion of competent English investigators, in which case Miss Vaughan may be held to have established not the truth of her family history, which is essentially beyond establishment, but her _bona fides_ in connection with its relation. After this the portion for which she is personally responsible, and from which there is no escape, will still fasten the charge of falsehood ineffaceably upon her narrative. In addition, then, to her personal history, Miss Vaughan's memoirs contain:--I. A mendacious biography of the English mystic, Thomas Vaughan. II. A secret history of the English Rosicrucian Fraternity, and of its connection with Masonry, which is also an impudent fraud. The two constitute one of the most curious literary forgeries which are to be met with in the whole range of Hermetic literature; and Hermetic literature, it is known, has been enriched by many triumphs of invention. I shall deal with the narratives plainly on the provisional assumption that Miss Vaughan has been herself deceived in regard to them. They are based upon family papers said to be now in possession of the Charleston Dogmatic Directory. The central facts which are sought to be established by means of these papers have been mentioned already in my eighth chapter, namely, that Miss Vaughan is one of the two last descendants of the alchemist Thomas Vaughan; that this personage made a compact with Satan in the year 1645, that under the name of Eirenaeus Philalethes, he wrote the well-known alchemical work entitled "An Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King," and that he consummated a mystical marriage with Venus-Astarte, of which the Palladian Templar-Mistress is the last development. For the purposes of these narratives the birth of Thomas Vaughan is placed in the year 1612, and his death, or rather translation, in the year 1678. At the age of twenty-four years, that is to say, in 1636, he proceeded to London, and there connected himself with the mystic Robert Fludd, by whom he was