It was on a Monday evening that I visited this modern Delphic oracle; and, strangely enough, as is often the case, other events seemed to lead up to this one. The very lesson on Sunday evening was full of astrology. It was, I may mention, the story of the handwriting on the wall and the triumph of Daniel over the magicians. Then I took up my Chaucer on Monday morning; and instead of the "Canterbury Tales," opened it at the "Treatise on the Astrolabe," which I had never read before, but devoured then as greedily as no doubt did "Little Lowis," to whom it is addressed. All this tended to put me in a proper frame of mind for my visit to Newington; so, after an early tea, we took my friend's figure of his nativity with us, and went. Professor Smith, we found, lived in a cosy house in the main road, the parlours whereof he devoted to the purposes of a medical magnetist, which was his calling, as inscribed upon the wire blinds of the ground floor front. We were ushered at once into the professor's presence by a woman who, I presume, was his wife--a quiet respectable body with nothing uncanny about her. The front parlour was comfortably furnished and scrupulously clean, and the celebrated Professor himself, a pleasant elderly gentleman, was sitting over a manuscript which he read by the light of a Queen's reading lamp. There was not, on the one hand, any charlatan assumption in his get-up, nor, on the other, was there that squalor and neglect of the decencies of life which I have heard sometimes attaches to the practitioners in occult science. Clad in a light over-coat, with spectacles on nose, and bending over his MS., Professor Smith might have been a dissenting parson en deshabille "getting off" his Sunday discourse, or a village schoolmaster correcting the "themes" of his pupils. He was neither; he was a nineteenth century astrologer, calculating the probabilities of success for a commercial scheme, the draft prospectus of which was the document over which he pored. As he rose to receive us I was almost disappointed to find that he held no wand, wore no robe, and had no volume of mystic lore by his side. The very cat that emerged from underneath his table, and rubbed itself against my legs was not of the orthodox sable hue, but simple tabby and white.