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The girl sprang up at the taunt.

"Afraid! No! I will meet the man. How can he harm me? It seems this is the Devil's own world, so it is meet to ask his servant for aid in trouble."

"Then listen, child. To-morrow about four in the afternoon I will call for you with a pair of oars. You must bring with you a heavy cloak and apparel for the night, as you must rest at my house."

"But the Earl

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"I will make it good with him. I shall tell him you are to visit me for a night that I may cheer you up and make you merry and ready to do his bidding. So be sprightly with him now, and leave moping until we hear the Master's message."

"Can there be any hope for me, Anne ? " "If you have faith and obey the Master." "I will, I will,” cried the unhappy girl.

Pretty Mrs. Turner, with the smile of a Madonna, bent down and kissed the lovely girl on her lips as if to plant the seal of Judas on the Devil's pact she had made for the barter of her soul.

Chapter X: Simon Forman

IMON FORMAN was a born

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born rogue.

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inclined to think that rogues are a human species carrying the poison of roguery in them, as some unfortunate humans are said to carry the germs of typhoid. Nature has been so far kind to rogues that she seems to provide them with a comfortable armour of self-deception so that so that your true rogue never sees himself in the mirror of the mind in all his naughty nakedness. Was there ever a rogue, or a quack, or a medium, or an astrologer, or a faith-healer, that did not build his fortune on a foundation of self-love and conceit, and buoy up his spirit to great adventure by a willing acceptance of the supernatural powers he claims to exercise?

Nature, too, ground-baits the swims of life with fodder for rogues. It is an axiom of human nature that man-and especially woman-has a more lively faith in magic than in science. A rogue may command a hundred clients for one that will come for advice to an honest man confessing human limitations.

Our learned and enlightened historians and publicists write with lofty pity of the folly of our forefathers with their childish beliefs in demonology, witchcraft, and black magic. But for my part, if I hankered after these idolatries, I would rather be a disciple of one of the picturesque scoundrels who read the stars and told fortunes in the melodramatic setting of the seventeenth century, than sit in a darkened modern drawing-room to watch the trances and listen to the futile whisperings of the necromancers of our own time.

Quackery and roguery are as old as Endor and, as the

philosopher tells us, are bound to continue as long a the rogue finds ready to hand "deceptibility, greediness ignorance, and prurient brute-mindedness fermenting in his behoof." These are the vitamines on which roguery thrives. I can find no age or country, hitherto, that has been free from this plague. Who are we, living in the cheap glass-houses of modern magic, that we should cast stones at the stately conservatories of sorcery patronised by our forbears ?

And for Simon Forman I will say at least this, that he worked hard at his trade and was acknowledged to be a master of his craft. He was bullied by the authorities and patronised by the aristocracy and feared and worshipped by the common herd. He came from Wessex, and was born at Quidhampton in Wiltshire in 1552 on New Year's Eve. He used to boast in after years that he was of high descent and claimed relationship with the Sandes, the Chitches, the Lovelesses, the Finches, and other goodly families.

He tells us in his diary that he suffered as a child from bad dreams, in which he foresaw the troubles of his riper years. Daniel Dunglas Home, the greatest medium of modern times, had similar childish experiences of dreams and visions. Forman as a baby of six would fascinate his parents with discourse of his dreams wherein mighty mountains and hills were rolling against him, and as they were about to overrun him and fall upon him he always managed to overtop them. Some day a scientist will read a paper for us on "The Influence of Flatulence on the Supernatural."

Forman's father died when he was a lad of ten, and from that time the child had a hard struggle before him, and found the world a harsh stepfather. His mother neglected him and made a domestic drudge of the boy, until he made up his mind to run away. Then we find him apprenticed to a grocer, who was also an apothecary in a small way. Here he learned to mix medicines and gained some small knowledge of drugs.

He had had an irregular kind of education, and at the age of twenty-one he became a poor scholar at Magdalen, Oxford, earning his daily bread as valet to young students of wealth, and acting as go-between in their youthful amours. Afterwards he was an usher in a school, a carpenter, and a wanderer over the face of the country. But that he soon began to practise magic is clear, for at the age of seven-and-twenty he tells us : "I did prophesy the truth of many things which afterwards came to pass and the very spirits were subject to me.' It is no wonder, then, that about this time he was lodged in jail for over a year for professing necromancy. But this did not deter him from his appointed career, and we find him posing either as a doctor or a magician or a mixture of both from that time onward.

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At the age of thirty he was definitely settled in London in practice as a doctor and an astrologer, and soon rose to sufficient eminence to be threatened by the College of Physicians and the Star Chamber. His practice was largely among women, and it is not uncharitable to suppose that much of it was of an undesirable character. The man himself was an immoral creature, and, though twice married, had many liaisons with his patients and others. He had a strange fascination for women, and "dear father Forman" was much beloved by the women dupes who flocked to his consulting-rooms. In this trait also he was, as biographies of similar rogues reveal, formally true to type.

One good and brave action of the man ought to be recorded to his credit. In 1592 when the plague swept large districts of London he continued to attend patients and visit those stricken with plague at a time when many of the regular practitioners had fled for safety into the country. Indeed, to poor patients he was always easily accessible, and if he robbed and preyed on rich fools, he was bounteous to poor ones, though maybe this was mere "bird lime for external game and a salve for assuaging his own spiritual sores."

These virtues, however, gave him a certain popularity and good name, and the attacks of the physicians, who had fled from the wrath of the plague, against a man who had stood his ground were not well received by the authorities. It was these attacks that led him to take a house in Lambeth within the jurisdiction of the Archbishop where the College of Physicians could not so easily pursue him. He had now many personal friends, and when James came to the throne and Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, was Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, he was given a licence by that University to practise medicine and took his M.D. at Jesus College.

It was to this learned doctor, now a man of about sixty, that many of the noblest in the land went for relief when the great Dr. Mayerne and the regular physicians had no further hope for them. And it was to this notable magician that lovers and plotters and women in misery and despair brought their troubles in real hope and faith of supernatural relief.

Mrs. Turner seems to have had no difficulty with the Earl in being allowed to carry off her new client. He himself had ridden toward Audley End to see his nephew. News had come that Essex was rapidly recovering, and the scandal could not for long be kept from the ears of the King unless the girl came to her senses and went home with her husband as a sensible woman should.

Mrs. Turner arrived at Northampton House in the afternoon as she had promised, and carried Frances to her home in Paternoster Row, where she told her that she had made an appointment with the Master for that night, and she must rest until it was time to start. The girl seemed to take fright at the night journey, but Mrs. Turner gave her such wise encouragement that she was soon reassured, and, drinking a soothing draught that her friend prepared for her, fell into a sounder sleep than she had enjoyed for many a night.

About nine o'clock Mrs. Turner awakened her, and the two threaded their way across St. Paul's Churchyard

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