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to happen which one wants to avert. Yes, whoever the man was, most assuredly he must be watching and waiting and listening for something or somebody in the mess-room, with that strained intentness yet absolute quiescence of posture! But why this vehement and altogether unaccountable foreboding of impending evil borne in upon me?

These bethinkings, however, were all the work of a few seconds, when, with eyes still riveted on the mysterious watcher, I heard several voices within the room calling out in excited tones as though some altercation were going on. One voice above all the others came with a kind of strident sharpness through the open window, in which it was easy to recognize D- -'s hard and distinct accents. I seem

to hear the words rasping out now as I write. I tell you I dealt myself the ace of spades" then another voice, young N's, "I'll take my oath you didn't," and then a terrible imprecation from D. which I will not repeat, invoking the Prince of Darkness to the ruin of his soul and body if what he had stated was not the truth.

As the last words struck on my ear the tall cloaked figure made an instantaneous movement, leaped up with a light swift spring to the window-sill he was standing under, and disappeared through the muslin curtains into the room, for I was unable to see farther into it from my position. Another instant, and an ear-piercing scream rang out,-a harsh appalling cry as of mingled pain, rage, and terror, from one in dire extremity-and to my horror and utter amazement he in the cloak reappeared at the window with D gripped in his arms, and half slung over one shoulder, apparently struggling desperately. One instant both faces were visible in the moonlight, D- -'s ghastly and convulsed, the other set back in its sombre hood and covered with a black domino, from the eyelets of which I was near enough to catch, as I fancied, a lightning-flash of fiendish malignancy and exultation. Ere I could collect my bewildered senses sufficiently to rush across to stop them, which I did a moment later, both men had vanished round an angle of the building. After them I rushed, shouting to the gate-sentry to alarm the guard, but on reaching the rear of the block not a soul was in sight. Out turned the guard,

and telling the sergeant to take a file and search the enclosure for two men fighting, I ran round to the mess-room. Meanwhile, and before I could reach the entrance-door to the mess, the bell inside was ringing out peal after peal, and an officer came tearing out full tilt, nearly knocking me down. What is it?" I burst out. "Where's C- "" (our regimental doctor); "is he in his quarters ?" was the simultaneous counter-question, and away he rushed toward the quarter where Dr. C— was located. I ran into

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the anteroom, along with one or two of the mess-waiters, helter-skelter. And what a sight inside! There, huddled in a group, with pale scared faces, a whist-table overturned, and a litter of cards strewn all over the floor, were some half-dozen of my comrades of the th, stooping over the prostrate form of D- who lay motionless, with lips apart, eyeballs fixed and staring, his head lying back, supported by one of our fellows. It was a terrible moment. The surgeon, Ccame in a minute after, tore open D-'s waistcoat and shirt, looked hard at him, knelt down and put his ear to the drawn mouth, felt about the region of the heart, and shook his head. Life was extinct.

As for myself, I could hardly believe my senses. The man I had just seen bodily carried off struggling in the arms of an unknown individual, lying here dead-it seemed an absolute hallucination! I was too taken aback to ask a single question; but as my inquiring eyes went round the circle of assembled officers, I could see on the countenances of all a certain constraint mingled with their horror, but not a syllable was said. It was plain there was a further mystery behind.

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The remains of the ill-fated D removed to a spare room in the officers' quarters, and there laid out to await official proceedings on the morrow.

It was not till after the funeral that I learned what had caused the uproar and altercation in the mess-room, which immediately preceded the terribly sudden catastrophe of that memorable night. And even at this distance of time, I tell the circumstances with pain and reluctance. D― had dined with the regiment, and after the band had finished playing, he and some half-dozen subalterns sat down to play vingt-et-un. The stakes were high, and it was remarked that D turned up

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a remarkable number of naturals. N, a not long-joined ensign, had been dealt an ace of spades, and" stood." At the conclusion of the round, D- who was dealing, again showed a "natural," the ace of which proved to be the ace of spades. This, of course, was too much for young N- green as he was; and though the tricks of the "heathen Chinee' had not then been sung, the case was manifestly something of the same kind as that worthy's performance. Hence the indignant remonstrance wafted out to my ears in the barrack square, followed by that awful oath. Whereupon, according to some of the party, a momentary gust of air seemed to shake the farther window-sash, and simultaneously the cardtable was stirred-it was, they said, like the tremor of a slight earthquake shockand straightway D— -threw his hands up and fell back in his chair, gurgling like one in a fit. The rest I have told, and I will say no more upon this. Which of us is prepared to cast a stone at an erring brother, leastwise when he is gone!

Needless to say, the officers of her Majesty's -th were for long thereafter uncommonly chary of conferring upon outsiders the privilege of honorary membership of their mess. And for many a year the tragic circumstances I have set down, with perhaps somewhat imperfect recollection of minor details, lingered on in the regiment as a kind of tradition, to be talked over on occasions, and amplified in various ways. But as for S- (of whom more presently) and myself, we kept our impressions as far as possible to ourselves, though something about them necessarily leaked out through the guard and sentry I had hailed, and from my original statements concerning the twain I believed I had seen so palpably in the moonlight.

I have never been able to clear up the mystery of this dread tragedy. When the formal inquiry by the military and civil authorities came on, it was elicited from the non-commissioned officer of the nightguard that no person of the description I gave had been seen to enter or leave the barrack precincts. The certified cause of the death was stated to be aneurisin, spasm, or something of the heart-what I suppose

we should call in common parlance, heartdisease. The affair was rather hushed up, in deference to the feelings of D -'s relatives, one of whom came out to the island shortly afterward to make inquiries and settle up the affairs of the deceased.

Those who have read thus far may not unnaturally have explained to themselves what I witnessed in the square as pure imagination, a phantasm of my own brain. And this view I should probably myself have inclined to, but for one circumstance, which I have now to mention. In the room above mine, and looking out on the square toward the messhouse, was quartered a very dear fellow, rather a favorite with us, although hardly robust enough for the roughing of a soldier's life. Now it happened on this very Thursday evening S- who had been ailing for some time back of Malta fever, was lying on a couch in his room by the open window-the night being so warm-and listening to the band. He was still there when I came into barracks, and when I was arrested by the sight of the tall solitary figure opposite. When, several days after the sad event, I touched on the subject, S- broke in with a very troubled face, and in a serious urgent voice asked, "Did you see the man in the long cloak waiting for him?" Then I knew that whatever extra vision had been vouchsafed to me had been shared by him. Ah me! 66 pale death knocks with equal step," sooner or later, at the door of us all, and S with nearly every other of my then comrades, has departed to that bourn where "there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom !

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As for me, were I to live to the patriarchal age of the oldest of the antedilu. vians, it would be impossible to obliterate the impressions forced successively upon me on that especially solemn but fatal Thursday. The cathedral service, the torchlight procession—and then, in terrible contrast, near about midnight, on the very threshold of a day most sad and sacred of all days to Christendom, the culminating horror of that shrouded one and his victim !-Blackwood's Magazine.

A SECRET RELIGION.

LAST winter in the town of Tarsus-at present very different from what it was in the days of St. Paul, being a decidedly mean city-I spent some weeks among a certain race of people known in the East as Ansairee, Nusayree, or Nasari. They practise a secret religion among themselves, while outwardly professing to be Mohammedans. It is a species of freemasonry among them; and, like the lady who hid in the clock, I grew very ambitious to unravel the mystery which surrounds them.

Lord Beaconsfield, in his romantic story of "Tancred," has given us a poetic and somewhat visionary account of this same people, whose natural habitat is the Lebanon. His young hero penetrated into the heart of these mountains, and got on intimate terms with the Queen of the Ansairee -a sort of faint shadow of "She." The Lebanon is undoubtedly the headquarters of the adherents of this religion, those who live at Tarsus being merely colonists from the central head; but then Tarsus forms a particularly favorable point for studying the people, inasmuch as they live herenot as they do in the Lebanon in remote mountain villages dangerous to approach, but in a town among Greeks, Armenians, and Turks, who are ever ready to spy on their mysterious observances and communicate the results. Some years ago an Ansairee named Suleiman abjured his faith, and, after becoming in turn a Jew and a Greek, finally settled down as a Protestant, and was baptized under the auspices of an American missionary. This missionary persuaded Suleiman to write down a detailed account of the Ansairee secret faith, which was published in the "Transactions" of the society. Although I do not rely much on the account of so extensive a renegade, nevertheless it formed a very valuable basis of operation from which to prosecute my inquiries.

The Ansairee of Tarsus are a race of Arab fellaheen. Of fine stature, and exceedingly industrious, they speak almost exclusively a dialect of Arabic, which their fathers brought with them about fifty years ago from the Lebanon when they came as colonists. They live for the most part in huts made of reeds on the outskirts of the town, and they are nearly all gardeners, owning that rich belt of gardens which sur

rounds the present town, and which is watered by irrigation from the classic stream of the Cydnus. They are reported to number something like ten thousand, the greater portion of whom dwell in and around Tarsus, though some inhabit villages scattered over the Cilician plain. Some of their gardens are really beautiful spots to look upon in the early spring, redolent with the fragrance of orange-blossom and gay with the red blossom of the pomegranate; but in summer these gardens are the hotbed of malaria, which makes Tarsus one of the most pestilential spots in the East.

Our investigations into the secret religion of the Ansairee had not proceeded very far when we found ourselves in possession of a curious fact. Last year, when travelling in the north of Persia, we investigated the religious tenets of a race existing there, and called by the Persians the "Ali-ullah-hi,'' whose religion is also secret, and based on the theory that Ali is God. We soon became aware that the religion of the Ansairee of Tarsus is almost identical. The village in the mountains of Persia which we visited as one of the headquarters of the sect is called "Barba Nasare, "' and the Ansairee of the Lebanon and Tarsus all claim as the founder of their religion a man who lived early in the eleventh century, called the "old man of Nasare" ("barba" being the Arabic for "old man”). Similarly, the Ali-ullah-hi of Persia say that Nasare was their founder, and after him they have called their village. "Ali" is the name for God, the Allah of the Mussulmans, the God of the Christians among them all, and hence their Persian appellation "Ali is God." identity of the religions gave us the somewhat startling fact of the vast extent of this secret religion, which has hitherto been supposed to be confined to the Ansairee Mountains, a branch of the Lebanon, and the adjacent villages, whereas in reality it extends from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Caspian, and may be said to be the religion of the nomad tribes who traverse these wild regions with their flocks. Future investigation proved to us that the large tribe known as Afshahs also belong to it, and another tribe called the Kizilbash also conform to a variant of the

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same religion, and many Kourdish tribes besides.

It is probably owing to the wildness of the district in which these people live that they have for so long been able to preserve their mysteries in secret; but the reason why they were started and the growth of the Ansairee belief will be probably forever veiled in obscurity. Ostensibly they are all members of the Mussulman faith, the only evidence to the contrary being that they have no mosques, say no prayers openly, and do not go to Mecca or any other point of pilgrimage.

This secret religion is one full of difficulties to the investigator, but the facts which I now propose to set forth are derived from three distinct sources. Firstly, the translation of the renegade Suleiman's statement; secondly, the information given me concerning the religions of the tribes. in the north of Persia by persons of reliable intelligence; and, thirdly, personal investigation made this year at Tarsus, and evidence given me by Greeks, Armenians, aud Protestants of that place. These three sources of information, which on the face of it can have had no possible chance of collusion, agree in the broad lines and most of the details; and I think we may now definitely consider the mysteries of this religion and its vast extent to be satisfactorily demonstrated.

The fundamental principle of the religious mystery is to believe that Ali is God. And in their forms of prayer, which are rather invocations than supplications, and some of which are couched in very fine language, the Ansairee address their god Ali in terms of rapturous adoration; a favorite mode of address is "Prince of Bees," the explanation of which is that the angels are supposed to take the form of bees and visit the earth to suck its sweetest fragrance. Ali is also addressed as "the Creator of all things, "" "the Seedburster," "the Light of men, true God," etc. They have a special prayer in which they revile those who blas. phemously say, as the Shiites of Persia do, that Ali ever took upon himself the form of man or ate and drank, or propagated his species, or was born of a woman. Ali is their great idea of the all-powerful, allseeing God who rules heaven and earth. The adherents of this vast secret religion, though adopting the general principles, are divided, as all religions are, into vari

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ous sects. I learned in Tarsus that four sects are generally supposed to exist.

First, the northerners, called the Shemali, or those who believe that Ali resides in the sun. To this sect the Ali-ullah-hi of northern Persia all belong, their ziarets or holy places are set upon the summits of hills, and the probable origin of this sect may doubtless be found in the existence of sun worship in Persia, and the attempt of the early apostles of the religion to blend as far as possible their new doctrine with that practised around them. Even to this day they are noted for their skill in fire-eating; and on the sacred tombs of their departed saints they affirm that the holy light of Ali is seen to descend, much as the Zoroastrians of this very district used to say of their fire temple in olden days.

The second sect into which the Ansairee are divided is that of the Kalazians, or moon-worshippers: that is to say, they affirm that Ali dwells in the moon, which he created as a palace for himself. When they look at the moon they profess to see Ali himself in the dark parts with the crown on his head and the sword of Mohammed in his hand; he is to them, in fact, a veritable man in the moon. While we were at Mersina and Tarsus we were witnesses ourselves to several disagreeable nocturnal addresses to Ali in the moon from bis devoted followers the Arab fella

heen. At full moon it was hard to sleep from the noise they made, beating tambourines, and howling hideously; and to the new moon it is their custom to make low obeisance and other forms of adoration by way of welcome, spreading out the hands as they pray to represent the crescent of the new moon. At Tarsus and Mersina the Arabs are nearly all Kalazians, hence we had a good opportunity of studying their peculiarities.

The next sect of Ansairee say that Ali dwells in the air, and commence their prayers with the formula, "O thou who art the air." Ali, they say, pervades everything, is omnipresent and omni

scient.

The fourth sect say that Ali dwells in the twilight. But of these two latter sects we had no opportunity of forming any opinion; and I presume they are only to be found in the recesses of their own mountains. To all intents and purposes the Ansairee may be said to consist of the

two former sects, and all my remarks refer exclusively to them.

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One of the most curious features of the Ansairee faith is their belief in a Trinity Ali, the Father; Mohammed, the Son; and Salman el Farsi, the Holy Ghost. Ali, the Father, became man through his veil or representative, Mohammed; and Mohammed appointed Salman to superintend the affairs of this world after his return to his father's kingdom. This mystery of a Trinity is the second item in the Ansairee religion, and is universally believed in by all the four sects; it is called "the mystery of the A. M.S.," from the initial letters of the three individuals of their Trinity. An Ansairee-or a Nasari, as their sect is more commonly called in the north-when taking an oath, will always swear by his "faith in the mystery of the Ain, Min, Sin ;" and one of the most common forms of prayer among them is to say the words "Ain, Min, Sin" five hundred times in succession.

Concerning the third person of their Trinity, Salman the Persian-or, as he is more commonly abbreviated, Sin-the Ansairee have many curious legends. They call him the communicator," the medium by which Ali makes his will known to man; he is supposed to have superintended the creation of the world, and to govern the atmospheric conditions of our globe.

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The mystery of the covenant of the Ain, Min, Sin may be said to be the one point which joins all Ansairee together, be they inhabitants of the Mediterranean shores or the mountains of northern Persia. There is something of freemasonry about it; and a body of nomads are said to know their fellows by a certain shake of the hands, and the oath, I abjure thee, by the faith of the covenant of Ali, the Prince of Believers, and by the covenant of the Ain, Min, Sin," after taking which oath an Ansairee dare not lie. It is also admitted by all the sects of the Ansairee that the old man, Nasare, born at the village of Nasaria, in Arabia, was the discoverer of this holy mystery; but he is somewhat cast into the shade by another divine, called Al Khusaibi, who perfected their religion, to whom most of the prayers they have now in use are attributed, and who taught that all great men and prophets, in all ages, are incarnations of Ali. In his list of incarna. tions Al Khusaibi includes Plato, Socrates,

Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed, the founder of Islamism; in fact, all the great leaders of various ages; whereas celebrated women, and the wives of these great men, are supposed to be incarnations of Salman Al Farsi, with the curious exception of the wives of Noah and Lot.

Many of the religious festivals and observances practised by the Ansairee would seem to be of distinctly Christian origin. So that some observers, including Dr. Wolff, have been induced to believe that the religion represents a species of decayed Christianity, and that the name of their founder, Nasari, is really derived from Nazarene. This may possibly be the case, and that the early incentive to mystery and secrecy was to avoid persecution; and that in the lapse of ages corrupt practices crept in, possibly through the instrumentality of Al Khusaibi, the so-called perfector of their religion. This, however, is pure speculation; and, as we find among the observances many strong traces of Judaism and pure Mohammedanism, I personally feel inclined to think that the original founders of the Ausairee faith borrowed the points which pleased them best from the religions of the people with whom they were in immediate contact.

At all their secret religious feasts the cup of wine forms an important feature. It is called by them "The image of Ali." This cup is first tasted by the sheikh in the south, or the seid in the north, who presides at the feast, and then handed round to those assembled, each recipient kissing the hand of the one who passes him the cup. Women are never admitted into this communion, though the Mohammedans circulate stories concerning the scenes of gross immorality which occur at these festivities; but they say the same thing of the Baabis and other religious sects which do not conform to their ritual; and, from our personal observation, I should not think there is any truth in these calumnies. In Persia a sheep without blemish is roasted at the feasts of the Ali-ullah-hi, the horns and the hoofs being first removed ; this is then brought into the assembly-room and placed before the seid, who distributes portions of it to all who are present. But of this ceremony I could find no trace among the Kalazians of the south. The Ansairee have many feast-days in year. With the Mohammedans, they

their

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