guineas during his sojourn. Cagliostro’s star, however, had not yet set, and his all too brief spell of fame and triumph was still in front of him. Providence, in the shape probably of the emissaries of Freemasonry, was waiting at Brussels to replenish his purse, and the same Providence, probably in the same guise, replenished it many times afterwards with no niggardly hand. From Brussels to The Hague, from The Hague to Nuremberg, from Nuremberg to Berlin, from Berlin to Leipzig, we trace the Count’s peregrinations, gathering fame and founding Egyptian Masonic Lodges as he went. It is true he met with setbacks and reverses, and the capital of Frederick the Great would have none of him, but it is clear that, in spite of these, his credit and reputation as a healer and clairvoyant grew steadily in volume. It was, in fact, on these two gifts that his fame rested. Though he claimed to have been taught the secrets of occultism by Althotas, or to have learned them from the Egyptian priests, there is no evidence[15] throughout the records of his career of his possessing anything but a smattering of such abstruse knowledge, and on several occasions, notably at St Petersburg, there is something more than a suspicion that his attempt to make good his claim to the name of occultist involved him in serious humiliation and rebuffs. The tales, however, of his predictions and their fulfilments were handed on from mouth to mouth, doubtless losing nothing on the way, while his reputation as a healer and the stories of the cures which he effected assured a perfect furore of enthusiasm in every fresh town to which he paid a visit. He took advantage of this enthusiasm to found fresh Masonic Lodges in all directions, and, while he consistently refused to receive payment of any kind for his cures, the shekels of an endless file of initiate converts poured into the coffers at the headquarters of Egyptian Masonry. Never was man at once more lavish with money and more indifferent to the comforts which money brings. “He slept in an armchair,” said Madame d’Oberkirch contemptuously, “and lived on cheese.” Whatever he spent, however, he appeared to draw from an inexhaustible widow’s cruise. As in spite of his refusal to accept fees, he paid his own bills with the greatest promptitude; the problem whence this continuous stream of gold flowed excited unbounded curiosity, and many were the fantastic stories invented to account for it.