huge scent-symphony dissolved in a shower of black roses which covered the ground ankle-deep.  An antique temple of exotic architecture had thrown open its bronze doors, and out there surged and rustled a throng of Bacchanalian beings who sported and shouted around a terminal god, which, with smiling, ironic lips, accepted their delirious homage.  White nymphs and brown displayed in choric rhythms the dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, and their goat-hoofed mates gave vertiginous pursuit.  At first the pagan gayety of the scene fired the fancy of the solitary spectator; but soon his nerves, disordered by the rout and fatigued by the spoor of so many odours, warned him that something disquieting was at hand.  He felt a nameless horror as the sinister bitter odour of honeysuckle, sandalwood, and aloes echoed from the sacred grove.  A score of seductive young witches pranced in upon their broomsticks, and without dismounting surrounded the garden god.  A battalion of centaurs charged upon them.  The vespertine hour was nigh, and over this iron landscape there floated the moon, an opal button in the sky.  Then to his shame and fear he saw that the Satyr had vanished and in its place there reared the Black Venus, the vile shape of ancient Africa, and her face was the face of Lilith.  The screaming lovely witches capered in fantastic spirals, each sporting a lighted candle.  It was the diabolic Circus of the Candles, the infernal circus of the Witches’ Sabbath.  Rooted to the ground, Baldur realized with fresh amazement and vivid pain the fair beauty of Adam’s prehistoric wife, her luxurious blond hair, her shapely shoulders, her stature of a goddess—­he trembled, for she had turned her mordant gaze in his direction.  And he strove in vain to bring back the comforting vision of the chamber.  She smiled, and the odours of sandal, coreopsis, and aloes encircled his soul like the plaited strands of her glorious hair.  She was that other Lilith, the only offspring of the old Serpent.  On what storied fresco, limned by what worshipper of Satan, had these accursed lineaments, this lithe, seductive figure, been shown!  Names of Satanic painters, from Hell-fire Breughel to Arnold Boecklin, from Felicien Rops to Franz Stuck, passed through the halls of Irving Baldur’s memory.

The clangour of the feast was become maddening.  He heard the Venus ballet music from Tannhaeuser entwined with the acridities of aloes, sandal, and honeysuckle.  Then the aroma of pitch, sulphur, and assafoetida cruelly strangled the other melodic emanations.  Lilith, disdaining the shelter of her nymphs and their clowneries, stood forth in all the hideous majesty of AEnothea, the undulating priestess of the Abominable Shape.  His nerves macerated by this sinful apparition, Baldur struggled to resist her mute command.  What was it?  He saw her wish streaming from her eyes.  Despair!  Despair!  Despair!  There is no hope for thee, wretched earthworm!  No abode but the abysmal House of Satan!  Despair, and you will be welcomed!  By a violent act of volition, set in motion by his fingers fumbling a small gold cross he wore as a watch-guard, the heady fumes of the orgy dissipated....