Magick Without Tears

358 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS to the snows. We took off the rope, and I sat down to coil it and light a pipe, while he wandered down. By this time I was as tired as 14 dogs, each one more tired than all the rest put together; what I call "silly tired ." I took a chance (for nightfall was near) on resting 5 or 10 minutes. Restored, I sprang to my feet, threw the coiled rope over my shoulder, and started to run down. But I was too tired to run; I slackened off. Then, to my amazement, I saw on the slopes below me, two little fellows hopping playfully about on the scree. (A moment while I remind you that all my romance was Celtic; I had never even read Teutonic myths and fables.) But these little men were exactly the traditional gnome of German folk-tales; the Heinzelmanner that one sees sometimes on German beer-mugs (I have never drunk beer in my life) and in friezes on the walls of a Conditorei. I hailed them cheerfully-at first I thought they were some of the local nobility and gentry of a type I had not yet encountered; but they took no notice, just went on playing about. They were still at it when I reached my cousin, sheltering behind some boulders at the foot of the slope; and I saw no more of them. I saw them as plainly as I ever saw anything; there was nothing ghostly or semi-transparent about them . A curious point is that I attached no significance to this. I asked my cousin if he had seen them; he said no. My mind accepted the incident as simply as if I had seen Chamois . Yet even to-day when I have seen lots and lots of things more wonderful, this incident stands out as the simplest and clearest of all my experiences. I give myself full marks! "Why?" Isn't it obvious? It means that I am not the semi-hysterical type who takes wish-phantasms for facts. When I started seriously to study and practise Magick in the Autumn of '98 e.v., I wished and wished with all my might; but I never got anything out of it. With the exception above recorded, my first experiences were the direct result of