One could no more write a memoir on trigonometry and say nothing about triangles, than survey the strange career just concluded and ignore the marvels coruscating through it. And at this early period of her enterprise [he means, before the Psychical Research exposure] she seems to have depended more on the startling effect of surprising powers she was enabled to exhibit than on the philosophical teaching ... which became the burden of her later utterances. Just so. It is easy to hold your miracles cheap—after they have been found out. Madame Blavatsky fell back on Object Two—when Object Three was discredited. But the taste for such things, even when it is _de rigueur_ to describe them as “occult applications of strictly natural laws,” is apt to grow upon any religious sect which once dabbles in them. Mrs. Besant, too, in due course fell a victim to the temptation to make capital out of the marvellous; and my readers will now be prepared to put their proper value on the deprecating expressions in this connexion which now, on the inevitable turn of the wheel, once more begin to be heard, and which will be redoubled, no doubt, when this narrative is fully before the public. CHAPTER III. MYSTIFICATION UNDER MADAME BLAVATSKY. “Now, dear, let us change the programme.... He is willing to give 10,000 rupees ... if only he saw a little ‘phenomenon’!”—BLAVATSKY-COULOMB LETTERS. It is no part of my present object to enter at length into the history and character of the late Madame Blavatsky. But a comparison of the earlier phase of the Theosophical Society with that of to-day is so indispensable to the right appreciation of both, that a brief _résumé_ (borrowed mainly from previous sketches of my own elsewhere) may be welcome at this point, even to readers already familiar with the subject. The Theosophical Society was born in America of Russo-Yankee parentage. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founded it at New York in 1874, with the aid first of Colonel Olcott, then a kind of journalist, who became, and still is, the president, and soon afterwards of William Q. Judge, then a lawyer’s clerk in Olcott’s brother’s office, who became, and still is, the vice-president. The previous career of the Foundress had been remarkable enough, if we accept hostile accounts of it—still more remarkable if we accept her own; but with this I am not concerned. From 1874 Madame Blavatsky’s history and that of the Theosophical Society are one.