A very singular man was he--the Rosicrucian--I knew him well. Many an hour, subsequent to that in which he is here introduced, have we sat together beneath the grateful shade of some glorious old elm on the green, flowery banks of Connecticut’s silver stream, and under some towering dome palm beside the bosom of still older Nilus, in the hoary land of the Pharaohs, of magic and of myth, he all the while pouring into my ear strange, very strange legends indeed--legends of Time and the other side of Time--all of which my thirsty soul drank in as the sun-parched earth drinks in the grateful showers, or the sands of Zin the tears of weeping clouds. And these tales, these legends put to shame the wildest fictions of Germany and the terror-haunted Hartz. Particularly was I struck with a half hint that once escaped his lips, to the effect that some men on the earth, himself among the number, had preëxisted on this sphere, and that at times he distinctly remembered localities, persons and events that were cotemporary with him before he occupied his present form, and consequently that his real age exceeded that even of Ahasuerus, the Jew, who, in the dolorous road, mocked the Man of Calvary, as he bore his cross up the steep and stony way, for which _leze majeste_ he was doomed to walk the earth, an outcast and vagabond, from that hour till Shiloh comes, according to the legends of Jewry. My friend, during our intimacy, often spoke concerning white magic, and incidentally insisted on his curious doctrine of transmigration. Nor was this all: He taught that the souls of people sometimes vacated their bodies for weeks together, during which they were occupied by other souls, sometimes that of a permanently disembodied man of earth; at others, that of an inhabitant of the aëreal spaces, who, thus embodied, roamed the earth at will. He, when closely questioned, declared his firm belief that he had lived down through many ages, and that for reasons known to himself, he was doomed to live on, like the great Artefius--that other Rosicrucian--until a certain consummated act (wherein he was to be involuntarily an active party) should release him from it and permit him to share the lot of other men.