It is no part of my (the editor’s) design to recount all the adventures of Beverly, nor to trace his paths through Egypt, Syria, Turkey, nor Europe. Suffice it, that I became so interested in his story that I accompanied him on more than one long journey. Occasionally I would lose sight of him for months together, but by the strangest seeming accident we would meet again, now on the top of Ghizeh’s great pyramid, now in the deserts of Dongola and Nubia; then in a French café, anon in the columned groves of Karnak and of Thebes. We often parted, and as often met again; and in the interim I had not failed to investigate certain grave secrets which he had confided to me. I did not fully believe his strange doctrines; but I am sure that he did, and therefore he commanded my sympathy and respect. As previously indicated, on my first acquaintance with him I was exceedingly sceptical in regard to the existence, in these days, of the Brotherhood of the Rosie Cross, and derided his assertions respecting their powers. True I had heard much, and read more, concerning the celebrated fraternity--an association that has proved a veritable God-send to scores of paper-stainers in all parts of the globe where letters reign, as witness Charles Mackay, Kingsley, Robert Southey, and fifty others, not omitting Bulwer Lytton, his “Zanoni,” and “Strange Story,” nor Hargrave Jennings and his “Curious Things” about “Fire” and the “Outside World.” In my varied travels through Europe and the East, as well as in this, my native land, I have met with scores, not to say hundreds, who boasted themselves Rosicrucians; and it is but a little while since there appeared, in a “spiritual” sheet in Boston, first a learned lecture, by a female “medium,” on the Rosicrucians, and a long communication, purporting to come from a deceased adept of the Order, both of which were quite laughable by reason of the total and utter ignorance displayed. Probably both of these “enlighteners” had heard or read of Dr. Everard’s “Compte de Gabalis,” and took that humorous bit of badinage as the real, simon-pure explanation of Rosicrucianism as, indeed, was natural, seeing that hundreds have fallen into the same comical error; for, upon applying the touch-stone to all these pretended adepts in the secrets, sublime and mighty, of the Order, it is found that, exceptionless, they are woefully deficient in even the rudiments of the genuine fraternity; nor have these modern pretenders any more real claims to the truth than the hordes of fanatics which swarmed all over Europe an age or two ago, and who brought ineffable disgrace both upon themselves and the sublime name which they stole.