Yet, if the busy tongues of the neighborhood spared Priscilla in one
way, they made themselves amends by renewed and wilder babble on
another score. They averred that the strange gentleman was a wizard,
and that he had taken advantage of Priscilla's lack of earthly
substance to subject her to himself, as his familiar spirit, through
whose medium he gained cognizance of whatever happened, in regions
near or remote. The boundaries of his power were defined by the
verge of the pit of Tartarus on the one hand, and the third sphere of
the celestial world on the other. Again, they declared their
suspicion that the wizard, with all his show of manly beauty, was
really an aged and wizened figure, or else that his semblance of a
human body was only a necromantic, or perhaps a mechanical
contrivance, in which a demon walked about. In proof of it, however,
they could merely instance a gold band around his upper teeth, which
had once been visible to several old women, when he smiled at them
from the top of the governor's staircase. Of course this was all
absurdity, or mostly so. But, after every possible deduction, there
remained certain very mysterious points about the stranger's
character, as well as the connection that he established with
Priscilla. Its nature at that period was even less understood than
now, when miracles of this kind have grown so absolutely stale, that
I would gladly, if the truth allowed, dismiss the whole matter from
my narrative.
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