56 Human Levitation. (January, 
Rome—once to assist at the death-bed of a named old man 
of his native village, whom he had promised to attend if 
possible; and again at the death of his mother. It is alsorelated 
of the great Spanish ethrobat that, while the business of a 
jubilee detained him at Madrid (1556-9), a lady, Elvira de 
Caravajal, in Estremadura, declared her resolve to have no 
other confessor till Father Peter might be within reach; and 
the same day he presented himself in her castle, announcing 
that he had been brought expressly from Madrid, and that 
she ought not to choose confessors so distant. There is 
doubtless pienty of exaggeration, and many stories of this 
kind must be apocryphal, but the notable fact is that they 
are told only of the same persons as the fully-attested 
levitations and other phenomena parallel to the modern so- 
called spiritism. 
The river transits of Peter of Alcantara have all the testi- 
mony we could expect for events of a past century, in that 
of the witnesses examined at his canonisation. Coming, 
during a flood, to a ferry on the Tagus, called Alconete, 
where it receives the tributary Almonte, he could not 
persuade the ferryman to risk the passage ; as night came 
on, and he was due and urgently expected on the other side, 
he prayed for some means of transit; when he suddenly 
found himself at the door of another ferry-house on that 
bank for which he was bound. Under perfectly similar cir- 
cumstances, he was similarly helped at a ferry on the Douro 
called Buycillo. Again having to cross the Tagus, from 
Portezuelo, where he left a companion exhausted, to reach 
a convent that expected him, at Garrovillas, he could by 
no cries arouse the sleeping boatman, whose house was 
beyond the river. While praying, he found himself before a 
house unknown to him, with the river beyond it; and, seeing 
lights, he besought the inmates to tell him if he could any- 
wise be put across, as he was expected at Garrovillas. They 
asked what the reverend Father meant: was he not just 
come from thence? No, he had come from Portezuelo. 
They assured him he must be dreaming: that nobody could 
come thence without crossing the river. The miracle was 
at length perceived, and thanks rendered. After this, we 
find him arriving with a companion, at a place where the 
swollen Guadiana had to be crossed, and the ferryman would 
not venture. The above experiences had given him faith to 
do what? Pray for a repetition of them? No; such a 
prayer is at no time ascribed to him, but conduct both more 
humble and more scriptural. Ordering his companion to 
tuck up his robe, and follow his footsteps, he leads on, like 
