left to answer them. But do not interrupt me,
while I husband my force to say what alone is
important to me and to you. Disappointed in
the hopes I had placed in you, I resolved to
repair to Paris,—that great furnace of all bold
ideas. I questioned learned formalists; I
listened to audacious empirics. The first, with all
their boasted knowledge, were too timid to
concede my premises; the second, with all their
speculative daring, too knavish to let me trust
to their conclusions. I found but one man, a
Sicilian, who comprehended the secrets that are
called occult, and had the courage to meet
Nature and all her agencies face to face. He
believed, and sincerely, that he was approaching
the grand result, at the very moment when he
perished from want of the common precautions
which a tyro in chemistry would have taken.
At his death the gaudy city became hateful; all
its pretended pleasures only served to exhaust
life the faster. The true joys of youth are
those of the wild bird and wild brute, in the
healthful enjoyment of Nature. In cities, youth
is but old age with a varnish. I fled to the
East; I passed through the tents of the Arabs;
I was guided—no matter by whom or by what
—to the house of a Dervish, who had had for
his teacher the most erudite master of secrets
occult, whom I knew years ago at Aleppo—
why that exclamation?"

"Proceed. What I have to say will come—
later."

"From this Dervish I half forced and half
purchased the secret I sought to obtain. I now
know from what peculiar substance the so-called
elixir of life is extracted; I know also the steps
of the process through which that task is
accomplished. You smile incredulously? What
is your doubt? State it while I rest for a
moment. My breath labours; give me more of
the cordial."

"Need I tell you my doubt? You have, you
say, at your command the elixir of life of which
Cagliostro did not leave his disciples the recipe;
and you stretch out your hand for a vulgar
cordial which any village chemist could give
you!"

"I can explain this apparent contradiction.
The process by which the elixir is extracted
from the material which hoards its essence, is one
that requires a hardihood of courage which few
possess. This Dervish, who had passed through
that process once, was deaf to all prayer, and
unmoved by all bribes, to attempt it again. He
was poor, for the secret by which metals may
be transmuted, is not, as the old alchemists
seem to imply, identical with that by which the
elixir of life is extracted. He had only been
enabled to discover, in the niggard strata of the
lands within range of his travel, a few scanty
morsels of the glorious substance. From these
he had extracted scarcely enough of the elixir to
fill a third of that little glass which I have just
drained. He guarded every drop for himself.
Who that holds healthful life as the one boon
above all price to the living, would waste upon
others what prolongs and recruits his own
being? Therefore, though he sold me his secret,
he would not sell me his treasure."

"Any quack may sell you the information
how, to make not only an elixir, but a sun and
a moon, and then scare you from the experiment
by tales of the danger of trying it! How do you
know that this essence which the Dervish
possessed was the elixir of life, since it seems you
have not tried on yourself what effect its precious
drops could produce? Poor wretch! who once
seemed to me so awfully potent, do you come to
the Antipodes in search of a drug that only exists
in the fables by which a child is amused?"

"The elixir of life is no fable," cried
Margrave, with a kindling of eye, a power of voice,
a dilation of form, that startled me in one just
before so feeble. "That elixir was bright in my
veins when we last met. From that golden
draught of the life-spring of joy I took all that
can gladden creation. What sage would not
have exchanged his wearisome knowledge for
my lusty revels with Nature? What monarch
would not have bartered his crown, with its
brain-ache of care, for the radiance that circled
my brows, flashing out from the light that was
in me? Oh again, oh again, to enjoy the freedom
of air with the bird, and the glow of the
sun with the lizard; to sport through the
blooms of the earth, Nature's playmate and
darling; to face, in the forest and desert, the
pard and the lion,—Nature's bravest and fiercest,
—her first-born, the heir of her realm, with the
rest of her children for slaves!"

As these words burst from his lips, there was
a wild grandeur in the aspect of this enigmatical
being which I had never beheld in the former
time of his affluent dazzling youth. And, indeed,
in his language, and in the thoughts it clothed,
there was an earnestness, a concentration, a
directness, a purpose, which had seemed wanting
to his desultory talk in the earlier days. I
expected that reaction of languor and exhaustion
would follow his vehement outbreak of
passion; but, after a short pause, he went on
with steady accents. His will was sustaining
his strength. He was determined to force his
convictions on me, and the vitality, once so rich,
rallied all its lingering forces to the aid of his
intense desire.

"I tell you, then," he resumed, with
deliberate calmness, " that, years ago, I tested in
my own person that essence which is the
sovereign medicament. In me, as you saw me at
L———- , you beheld the proof of its virtues.
Feeble and ill as I am now, my state was
incalculably more hopeless when formerly restored
by the elixir. He, from whom I then took the
sublime restorative, died without revealing the
secret of its composition. What I obtained
was only just sufficient to recruit the lamp of
my life, then dying down and no drop was left
for renewing the light which wastes its own
rays in the air that it gilds. Though the Dervish
would not sell me his treasure, he permitted me
to see it. The appearance and odour of this
essence are strangely peculiar—unmistakable by
one who has once beheld and partaken of it.