Wizard Witch

President Emeritus Harry Pratt Judson of the University of Chicago was there, and Dr. James H. Breasted, famed Egyptologist. Drs. Shailer Mathews and Theodore G. Scares of the Chicago University divinity school, and Maurice L. Goodkind of the medical school, were there. So were Lessing Rosenthal, Dr. Louis Mann, Harold H. Swift and other important Chicago south-siders--all at the home of Julius Rosenwald, philanthropist, for a party as distinguished as it was unusual.

The chief guests were Edward Lasker, chess wizard,* and a swarthy gentleman whom he had found in Manhattan, a gentleman with a queer eye and rapt manner, Ascander Khaldah Bey of Egypt. Mr. Khaldah performed some feats for Mr. Rosenwald and his guests that made them not only curious but distinctly uneasy.

He took Mr. Rosenwald by the hand and, without asking, correctly stated the name of his dead mother: "Augusta Hammerslough Rosenwald." Dr. Goodkind thought of the medical term for a rare disease, a term occupying several lines of newsprint. Mr. Khaldah concentrated, could not pronounce the term but spelled it out correctly. Mr. Swift was informed of the date and place of his father's birth. Dr. Breasted wrote out a sentence in Arabian and hid it. Mr. Khaldah recited it sight unseen. He stood 20 or 30 feet from his marveling audience and drew for them geometrical designs they pictured mentally; uttered correctly combinations of figures in the hundred-thousands; rendered pieces of remembered music. When they departed, not one of the distinguished guests had a satisfactory explanation for what they had beheld. Dr. Lasker, a student of mental matters, assured them that Mr. Khaldah's feats ranged from those familiar in telepathy to others for which there were only two or three precedents. Another "seance" was arranged at the home of Dr. Albert Abraham Michelson, the physicist whose work helped Einstein to his classic theory.

Simultaneously, British notables, headed by Director Harry Price of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, pondered the antics of coins, which were invisibly pitched across a room where they were observing, under strict control conditions, one Eleoncre Zugan, 13, cheerful, chunky Rumanian wench who had announced: "The Devil has come with me to London. The Devil is very pleased to come to London, for he hopes to find plenty to do here." Eleonore had been rescued from a Rumanian madhouse by an elderly Rumanian countess, after being incarcerated by peasants who believed her a "witch-girl," cursed by her grandmother. Besides the coins flying at her, the observers saw stigmatic markings--teeth marks, weals, pricks--appear on Eleonore's face and arms, spontaneously they were sure.

*Not to be confused with Albert Davis Lasker, chairman of the U. S. Shipping Board, chairman Lord & Thomas.