The audience laughed at this unexpected sally. Sir Henry felt uncomfortable. But the Seer, unabashed, went on as before, without an instant’s pause, to the succeeding envelopes. He ran through them all in the same rapid manner, till he reached the last, “Miss Violet Farrar,—kindly concentrate your thoughts on the subject, Señorita,—Miss Farrar wrote a couple of lines from Swinburne: ‘Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow, But the world shall end when I forget.’ That’s the last I received!” He drew a deep sigh. Then without one instant interposed, “Turn up the lights, please,” he said. “To show all’s fair, I’ll return you your envelopes.” Will turned the light on again in a turmoil of surprise. He had never before seen anything that looked so like a genuine miracle. There stood the Seer, erect and smiling, with all the envelopes in a huddled heap on the little round table on the platform beside him. With a quiet air of triumph, he stepped down to the floor, and reading out the names as he walked along the rows, replaced in each outstretched hand—its own envelope, unopened. The visitors tore the covers off before his eyes, and found inside—their own manuscript, exactly as they had written it. It was a most convincing trick, and the Colorado Seer had good cause to be proud of the astounded way in which his company received it. A buzz of voices ran humming round the room for some minutes together as the Seer concluded. Everybody hazarded some conjecture of his own, more or less inept, as to how the man did it. The younger ladies were mostly of opinion that he “must have a confederate”—though how a confederate could help him with this particular trick, they didn’t deign to explain, not having, indeed, any clear picture of their own in their sapient heads as to the nature of the confederacy. They merely threw out the hint in the self-same expansive and generous spirit in which they are wont to opine that “it’s done by electricity,” or, that “the thing has springs in it.” Mr Arthur Sartoris, the East End curate, and two old maids with amiable profiles in a back row, were inclined to set it down to “cerebral undulations in the ethereal medium”—which, of course, would be competent to explain almost anything, if they only existed. Lady Martindale leaned rather towards the extremer view that “the man had dealings with a familiar spirit,” and objected to take any further part in such doubtful proceedings. Sir Henry, while not venturing to offer any direct explanation, was yet reminded at once of some very remarkable and surprising feats he had seen performed by a fakir in India, who had told him the name of his future wife, made a mango-tree grow and bear fruit before his eyes, and sent a boy to climb up a loose end of twine till he disappeared in space, whence he was precipitated in fragments a few minutes later, to get up and walk away one moment afterwards, at the first touch of the fakir’s wand, as cool and