breathes, and the heart still beats. But I am
convinced that, though she can neither speak
nor stir, nor give sign, she is fully, sensitively,
conscious of all that passes around her. She is
like those who have seen the very coffin carried
into their chamber, and been unable to cry out,
' Do not bury me alive!' Judge then for yourself,
with this intense consciousness and this
impotence to evince it, what might be the effect
of your presence— first an agony of despair, and
then the complete extinction of life!"

"I have known but one such case. A mother
whose heart was wrapt up in a suffering infant.
She had lain for two days and two nights, still,
as if in her shroud. All, save myself, said, ' Life
is gone.' I said, 'Life still is there.' They
brought in the infant, to try what effect its
presence would produce; then her lips moved, and
the hands crossed upon her bosom trembled."

"And the result?" exclaimed Faber, eagerly.
"If the result of your experience sanction your
presence, come; the sight of the babe rekindled
life?"

"No; extinguished its last spark! I will not
enter Lilian's room. I will go away; away
from the house itself. That acute consciousness!
I know it well! She may even hear me move
in the room below, hear me speak at this moment.
Go back to her, go back! But if hers be the
state which I have known in another, which may
be yet more familiar to persons of far ampler
experience than mine, there is no immediate
danger of death. The state will last through
to-day, through to-night; perhaps for days to
come. Is it so?"

"I believe that for at least twelve hours
there will be no change in her state. I believe
also, that if she recover from it, calm and
refreshed, as from asleep, the danger of death will
have passed away."

"And for twelve hours my presence would
be hurtful?"

"Rather say fatal, if my diagnosis be right."

I wrung my friend's hand, and we parted.

Oh, to lose her now! now that her love and
her reason had both returned, each more vivid
than before! Futile, indeed, might be
Margrave's boasted secret; but at least in that
secret was hope. In recognised science I saw
only despair.

And, at that thought, all dread of this
mysterious visitor vanished— all anxiety to
question more of his attributes or his history.
His life itself became to me dear and precious.
What if it should fail me in the steps of the
process, whatever that was, by which the life of
my Lilian might be saved!

"The shades of evening were now closing in. I
remembered that I had left Margrave without
even food for many hours. I stole round to the
back of the house, filled a basket with aliments,
more generous than those of the former day;
extracted fresh drugs from my stores, and, thus
laden, hurried back to the hut. I found
Margrave in the room below, seated on his mysterious
coffer, leaning his face on his hand.
When I entered, he looked up and said:

"You have neglected me. My strength is
waning. Give me more of the cordial, for we have
work before us to-night, and I need support."

He took for granted my assent to his wild
experiment; and he was right.

I administered the cordial. I placed food
before him, and this time he did not eat with
repugnance. I poured out wine, and he drank it
sparingly, but with ready compliance, saying,
"In perfect health I looked upon wine as
poison, now it is like a foretaste of the glorious
elixir."

After he had thus recruited himself, he seemed
to acquire an energy that startlingly contrasted
his languor the day before; the effort of breathing
was scarcely perceptible; the colour came
back to his cheeks; his bended frame rose
elastic and erect.

"If I understood you rightly," said I, " the
experiment you ask me to aid can be
accomplished in a single night?"

"In a single night— this night."

"Command me. Why not begin at once?
What apparatus or chemical agencies do you
need?"

"Ah," said Margrave. " Formerly, how I was
misled! Formerly, how my conjectures
blundered! I thought, when I asked you to give
a month to the experiment I wished to make,
that I should need the subtlest skill of the
chemist. I then believed, with Van Helmont,
that the principle of life is a gas, and that
the secret was but in the mode by which the
gas might be rightly administered. But now,
all that I need is contained in this coffer, save
one very simple material— fuel sufficient for a
steady fire for six hours. I see even that is at
hand, piled up in your outhouse. And now for
the substance itself— to that you must guide
me."

"Explain."

"Near this very spot is there not gold— in
mines yet undiscovered?— and gold of the purest
metal?"

"There is. What then? Do you, with the
alchemists, blend in one discovery— gold and
life?"

"No. But it is only where the chemistry of
earth or of man produces gold, that the substance
from which the great pabulum of life can be
extracted by ferment, is found. Possibly in the
attempts at that transmutation of metals, which
I think your own great chemist Sir Humphry
Davy— allowed might be possible, but
held to be not worth the cost of the process,
—possibly, in those attempts, some scanty
grains of this substance were found by the
alchemists, in the crucible, with grains of the
metal as niggardly yielded by pitiful mimicry
of Nature's stupendous laboratory; and from
such grains enough of the essence might, perhaps,
have been drawn forth, to add a few years
of existence to some feeble greybeard,— granting,
what rests on no proofs, that some of the
alchemists reached an age rarely given to man.
But it is not in the miserly crucible, it is in
the matrix of Nature herself, that we must seek