Egypt, which, more than thirty centuries ago, produced men so confident of their magical skill as to venture to emulate the miracles of Moses, still has pretenders to preternatural powers. The modern magicians seem by no means to be a degenerate race. One of their modes of delusion is “the magic mirror of ink,” and the address with which they manage the trick is really wonderful, and, indeed, inexplicable. It is performed by pouring ink into the hand of a boy not arrived at puberty, an unmarried woman, or a woman who is “as ladies wish to be who love their lords.” The boy is told to look into the ink, and to say what he sees. Mr. Lane, in his recent valuable work on Egypt, has described the operation, and he declares his utter inability to account for the result. “After some preliminary ceremonies had been gone through, the magician,” says he, “addressed himself to me, and asked me if I wished the boy to see any person who was absent or dead. I named Lord Nelson, of whom the boy had evidently never heard; for it was with much difficulty he pronounced the name, after several trials. The magician desired the boy to say to the Sooltan, ‘My master salutes thee, and desires thee to bring Lord Nelson: bring him before my eyes, that I may see him, speedily.’ The boy then said so; and almost immediately added, ‘A messenger is gone, and has returned, and has brought a man, dressed in a black[15] suit of European clothes; the man has lost his left arm.’ He then paused for a moment or two, and, looking more intently and more closely into the ink, he said, ‘No, he has not lost his left arm, but it is placed to his breast.’ This correction made his description more striking than it had been without it; since Lord Nelson generally had his empty sleeve attached to his coat: but it was the _right_ arm that he had lost. Without saying that I suspected the boy had made a mistake, I asked the magician whether the objects appeared in the ink as if actually before the eyes, or as if in a glass, which makes the right appear left. He answered, that they appeared as in a mirror. This rendered the boy’s description faultless.” Mr. Lane adds, “A short time since, after performing in the usual manner, by means of a boy, he prepared the magic mirror in the hand of a young English lady, who, on looking into it for a little while, said that she saw a broom sweeping the ground without any body holding it, and was so much frightened that she would look no longer.” To make this appearance understood, it must be mentioned, that the first thing seen in the mirror is the sweeping of the ground by a broom. In the case of Lord Nelson, however, the broom was in the hands of a man. The boy is said not to have been a confederate of the magician.