The identical direction, and almost in the very words given by the mysterious personage to Hokeis, in the hotel of the Palais Royale on the previous night. The circumstance made a great impression on my mind, but prudence forbade all mention of it to Beverly. He seemed quite glad of this opportunity of solving the strange riddle, and, to my great delight, begged and insisted that I should spend the day with him, and in the evening we would investigate the subject together; and that I readily consented, may be easily imagined. There were several motives prompting me in this affair--curiosity, friendship, and a vague hope of baffling what Beverly regarded as his doom. Those who have read carefully what has here been written, will remember that Beverly had convinced me that there was more in the strange legend, regarding the king, the princess, the riddle, the murder, and the curse and its fulfillment, than the majority of people would be willing to concede. In short, I was decidedly inclined to believe in Dhoula Bel and the other doomed one, but I had no faith whatever in either Miakus, Ravalette, the Italian Count, or Vatterale. I did not believe all these names belonged to one person, and I finally settled down on the following theory, point by point:--1st, That there was in existence a society, having its head-quarters in Paris, the members of which were practisers of Oriental magic and necromancy, in which they were most astonishingly expert. 2d, That the organization had for its object, not the attainment of wealth or political position, but abstract knowledge, and the absolute rule of the world through the action and influence of the brotherhood upon the crowned heads and officials of the world. 3d, That this association was governed by a master-mind, and that mind was Ravalette’s. 4th, That this society had cultivated mesmerism to a degree unapproachable by all the world besides. That they had exhausted ordinary clairvoyance, and eagerly sought a brain which would admit of the most thorough magnetization, and whose natural tendency was toward the mystical, transcendental and weird, yet strong, strong-willed, logical, emulative, daring and ambitious; and that, to discover such, their agents had traversed all four continents of the globe; and that finally they had heard of Beverly, whose fame as a seer was world-wide; that they had found him, and, beyond doubt, had learned the strange particulars of his life, the legend, and his hope. They had seen him, and at once decided that, under their wonderful manipulation, he could be placed in a magnetic slumber many degrees more profound than is possible in one case in five millions, and reach a degree of mental lucidity and psycho-vision that would not only surpass all that the earth had yet witnessed in that direction, from Budha, Confucius, Zoroaster, and the Oracles of Greece, down to the days of Boehme and the Swede, since when there has been no clairvoyant really worthy of the name.