Though the general knowledge of the rites of the Theosophists is vague, there is no concealment about the temples of the worshippers. But there are strange rites practised in the heart of busy London, and there is no sign or token given of the meeting-place of those who indulge in them. In a gloomy synagogue in a by-street of Alien Land the patriarchal Jew may be seen writing out the sacred amulets and scrolls by the light of a guttering candle--a picture for a Rembrandt; but no one but her dupes sees the "witch" or the "wise woman," who still carries on her trade in the twentieth century, making the charms and the love philtres that she knows where to sell. The West End palmists and fortune-tellers flourished for a time and had their day, and went down before the arm of the law; but a far more dangerous trade than theirs, which did but minister to a foolish, fashionable craze, is still carried on daily and nightly in secret in unsuspected places. It is nine o'clock at night and the darkness has descended over London. At the top of a street near Victoria Station, once inhabited by the well-to-do, but now fallen into the seediness of floor-letting, a cab stops and a lady closely veiled alights. She makes her way to one of the houses, looking furtively behind her now and then. She rings the bell and is admitted. If we follow her we shall see her descend the stairs to the basement. She is shown into a room dimly lighted and fantastically draped, and filled with strange objects. A dark, sallow-faced woman, clad in a curious Eastern robe, receives her, and the door is closed and locked. The woman passes for a seeress--a modern witch. She is consulted by women of education, women who come to her to gaze into the crystal and the ink pool, to peer into the future, and who--strange as it may seem to common sense, level-headed people--implicitly believe in the supernatural powers of the wily adventuress, the cunning woman who trades upon their credulity. We can understand the ignorant servant-girl who pays the half-crown she can ill spare for some wretched hag in a garret to read the cards for her and tell her her future; but there is nothing more amazing in the mysteries of London than the hold which the clairvoyante and the "divineress"--generally, according to themselves, "the seventh child of a seventh child"--still have upon the minds of women of education and position. There is hardly one of the clairvoyantes who practised in the West until the law stepped in who is not still carrying on the business, though in a more secret and a less profitable manner. Here is a house that the agents would call "a desirable villa residence." It stands in a long garden at the corner of one of the leafy roads of St. John's Wood.