that chanced to be there, opened the window,
and threw the crumbs into the lane. The
sparrows gathered round the crumbs.

"Now," said Margrave, "the sparrows come
to that dull pavement for the bread that recruits
their lives in this world; do you believe that one
sparrow would be silly enough to fly to a house-
top for the sake of some benefit to other sparrows,
or to be chirruped about after he was
dead? I care for science as the sparrow cares
for bread; it may help me to something good for
my own life, and as for fame and humanity, I
care for them as the sparrow cares for the general
interest and posthumous approbation of
sparrows!"

"Margrave; there is one thing in you that
perplexes me more than all else— human puzzle
as you are—in your many eccentricities and
self-contradictions."

"What is that one thing in me most perplexing?"

"This; that in your enjoyment of Nature you
have all the freshness of a child, but when you
speak of Man and his objects in the world, you talk
in the vein of some worn-out and hoary cynic. At
such times, were I to close my eyes, I should say
to myself, 'What weary old man is thus venting
his spleen against the ambition which has failed,
and the love which has forsaken him?' Outwardly
the very personation of youth, and revelling like
a butterfly in the warmth of the sun and the
tints of the herbage, why have you none of the
golden passions of the young? their bright
dreams of some impossible love—their sublime
enthusiasm for some unattainable glory? The
sentiment you have just clothed in the illustration
by which you place yourself on a level with
the sparrows is too mean and too gloomy to be
genuine at your age. Misanthropy is among
the dismal fallacies of greybeards. No man, till
man's energies leave him, can divorce himself from
the bonds of our social kind."

"Our kind—your kind, possibly! But I——"

He swept his hand over his brow, and resumed,
in strange, absent, and wistful accents: "I
wonder what it is that is wanting here, and of
which at moments I have a dim reminiscence."
Again he paused, and gazing on me, said with
more appearance of friendly interest than I had
ever before remarked in his countenance, "You
are not looking well. Despite your great
physical strength, you suffer like your own sickly
patients."

"True! I suffer at this moment, but not from
bodily pain."

"You have some cause of mental disquietude?"

"Who in this world has not?"

"I never have."

"Because you own you have never loved;
certainly, you never seem to care for any one
but yourself; and in yourself you find an
unbroken sunny holiday—high spirits, youth,
health, beauty, wealth. Happy boy!"

At that moment my heart was heavy within me.

Margrave resumed:

"Among the secrets which your knowledge
places at the command of your art, what would
you give for one which would enable you to defy
and deride a rival where you place your affections,
which could lock to yourself, and imperiously
control, the will of the being whom you desire
to fascinate, by an influence paramount,
transcendant?"

"Love has that secret," said I, "and love
alone."

"A power stronger than love can suspend, can
change, love itself. But if love be the object or
dream of your life, love is the rosy associate of
youth and beauty. Beauty soon fades, youth soon
departs. What if in nature there were means
by which beauty and youth can be fixed into
blooming duration—means that could arrest the
course, nay, repair the effects, of time on the
elements that make up the human frame?"

"Silly boy! Have the Rosicrucians
bequeathed to you a prescription for the elixir of
life?"

"If I had the prescription I should not ask
your aid to discover its ingredients."

"And is it in the hope of that notable
discovery you have studied chemistry, electricity,
and magnetism? Again I say, Silly boy!"

Margrave did not heed my reply. His face
was overcast, gloomy, troubled.

"That the vital principle is a gas," said he,
abruptly, "I am fully convinced. Can that gas
be the one which combines caloric with oxygen?"

"Phosoxygen? Sir Humphry Davy demonstrates
that gas not to be, as Lavoisier supposed,
caloric, but light, combined with oxygen, and
he suggests, not indeed that it is the vital
principle itself, but the pabulum of life to organic
beings." *
* See Sir Humphry Davy on Heat, Light, and
the Combinations of Light.

"Does he?" said Margrave, his face clearing
up. "Possibly, possibly then, here we approach
the great secret of secrets. Look you, Allen
Fenwick, I promise to secure to you unfailing
security from all the jealous fears that now
torture your heart; if you care for that fame which
to me is not worth the scent of a flower, the
balm of a breeze, I will impart to you a knowledge
which, in the hands of ambition, would dwarf
into common-place the boasted wonders of
recognised science. I will do all this, if, in return,
but for one month you will give yourself up to
my guidance in whatever experiments I ask, no
matter how wild they may seem to you."

"My dear Margrave, I reject your bribes as I
would reject the moon and the stars which a child
might offer to me in exchange for a toy. But I
may give the child its toy for nothing, and I may
test your experiments for nothing some day when
I have leisure."

I did not hear Margrave's answer, for at that
moment my servant entered with letters. Lilian's
hand! Tremblingly, breathlessly, I broke the
seal. Such a loving, bright, happy letter; so