Magick Without Tears

488 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS hun dred percent red-blooded , clean-living, heir of the Eternities , takes his young fiancee and female counterpart to the "Old Absinthe House" in New Orleans to show her the terrible results of Wrong-Doing. They are going to avoid all that ; their child is going to be the Quintessence of Americanism. They marry and take a cottage by Lake Pasquaney . Presently , he being (so she said) away on a business trip, the tradesmen complained that she seemed to need very little pabulum. Somehow, people got suspicious , and sure enough, when they broke in, they found that she had pickled him! This story is founded on fact ; damn it, why did the MS have to get lost? Even suicide is not a "dead bird." I knew a creature once - careless observers often mistook him for a man- who tried three times, pistol, rope and poison. Something always went wrong. (Like the Babbacombe murderer, who went to the scaffold three times, and lived to a green old age!) Finally he did poison himself , by accident, when he had no intention whatever of doing anything of the sort. Where's that Book of Lies? Ah, here we are. "It is chance, and chance only, that rules the Universe; therefore , and therefore only, life is good." Then, is it mere fatuity and folly to make plans? Was not the IXth Atu, the Hermit, also at one time called "Prudence"? Of course . Abstract philosophy rarely coincides with common-sense. We should plan as carefully as we can; but we should always allow a margin for every conceivable accident . Nor should we trust to luck, like England, when she goes to war. Bret Harte has an admirable story "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" in which the "bad man," the crooked gambler, gives his life for the safety of the rest of his party , and winds up all with the remark: "Life isn't in having the luck of the cards, but in playing a poor hand well." Yes, I daresay, all very fine; but what you wanted to know was about the propriety of taking risks in Magick.