In the year 1904, a troupe of Hindoo jugglers, acrobats and snake charmers were brought to the United States to entertain lovers of the marvelous at the St. Louis Exposition. Among them was a man with an unpronounceable name, whom the management dubbed “Alexander.” I met the dusky necromancer at Martinka’s in the summer of 1904. He went about the streets of New York garbed in his rich Oriental costume. The street gamins always followed him from his hotel to the Palace of Magic and stood about the doorway in crowds, awaiting in breathless astonishment some feat of wizardry. But the impassive Hindoo paid no attention to his youthful admirers, but went on blowing wreaths of smoke from Egyptian cigarettes, and making purchases of magical apparatus with which to astonish the natives of his beloved India. Taking magic tricks to India is like carrying coals to Newcastle. But Alexander had a very high opinion of Occidental conjuring, and fully realized the fact that the sorcerers of the West, aided by all the resources of modern science, were the superiors of the Hindoo fakirs, except perhaps in one particular—feats of hypnotism and apparent death. I saw Alexander, in Martinka s little back shop, support a couple of heavy iron weights, which were fastened at the ends of a cord, upon his eyelids. The cord rested on the lids, the weights dangling at the ends of the string. The pressure upon the eyeballs must have been tremendous. Alexander presented Dr. Ellison with a wand—the thigh-bone of a sacred simian from the famous monkey temple of India. The bone was inscribed with cabalistic characters and Sanskrit sentences. The monkey is famous for playing {302} tricks, and the thigh-bone of a sacred monkey consequently ought to make an admirable mystic wand for a conjurer. The doctor prizes this unique relic very highly, and is thinking of building a shrine of Benares copper for its reception. In the future, crowds of wandering wizards will doubtless make pilgrimages to this shrine to gaze in ecstasy at the holy relic, just as crowds of East Indians visit the temple where Buddha’s wisdom tooth is displayed for the delectation of the faithful. VIII. In the year 1894 there flashed on the theatrical horizon of Europe an eccentric gentleman conjurer, who performed with a mask on his face, advertising himself as _L’Homme Masqué_ (the Masked Man). “Who is he?” inquired the _quid nuncs_ of the vaudeville theatres. Nobody seemed to know. Had the Man in the Iron Mask, celebrated by Voltaire and Alexander Dumas, come to life again? “What does he wear a mask for?” asked the public. “To hide his aristocratic features,” replied the manager of _L’Homme Masqué_. “He wishes to remain incognito.”