"Thou art an hardened villain, Varney," replied Alasco; "many will do

those things who dare not speak of them."

"And many speak of them who dare not do them," answered Varney. "But be

not wroth--I will not quarrel with thee. If I did, I were fain to live

on eggs for a month, that I might feed without fear. Tell me at once,

how came thine art to fail thee at this great emergency?"

"The Earl of Sussex's horoscope intimates," replied the astrologer,

"that the sign of the ascendant being in combustion--"

"Away with your gibberish," replied Varney; "thinkest thou it is the

patron thou speakest with?"

"I crave your pardon," replied the old man, "and swear to you I know but

one medicine that could have saved the Earl's life; and as no man

living in England knows that antidote save myself--moreover, as the

ingredients, one of them in particular, are scarce possible to be come

by, I must needs suppose his escape was owing to such a constitution of

lungs and vital parts as was never before bound up in a body of clay."

"There was some talk of a quack who waited on him," said Varney, after

a moment's reflection. "Are you sure there is no one in England who has

this secret of thine?"

"One man there was," said the doctor, "once my servant, who might have

stolen this of me, with one or two other secrets of art. But content

you, Master Varney, it is no part of my policy to suffer such

interlopers to interfere in my trade. He pries into no mysteries more,

I warrant you, for, as I well believe, he hath been wafted to heaven on

the wing of a fiery dragon--peace be with him! But in this retreat of

mine shall I have the use of mine elaboratory?"

"Of a whole workshop, man," said Varney; "for a reverend father abbot,

who was fain to give place to bluff King Hal and some of his courtiers,

a score of years since, had a chemist's complete apparatus, which he was

obliged to leave behind him to his successors. Thou shalt there occupy,

and melt, and puff, and blaze, and multiply, until the Green Dragon

become a golden goose, or whatever the newer phrase of the brotherhood

may testify."

"Thou art right, Master Varney," said the alchemist setting his teeth

close and grinding them together--"thou art right even in thy very

contempt of right and reason. For what thou sayest in mockery may in

sober verity chance to happen ere we meet again. If the most venerable

sages of ancient days have spoken the truth--if the most learned of

our own have rightly received it; if I have been accepted wherever I

travelled in Germany, in Poland, in Italy, and in the farther Tartary,

as one to whom nature has unveiled her darkest secrets; if I have

acquired the most secret signs and passwords of the Jewish Cabala, so

that the greyest beard in the synagogue would brush the steps to make

them clean for me;--if all this is so, and if there remains but one

step--one little step--betwixt my long, deep, and dark, and subterranean

progress, and that blaze of light which shall show Nature watching her

richest and her most glorious productions in the very cradle--one

step betwixt dependence and the power of sovereignty--one step betwixt

poverty and such a sum of wealth as earth, without that noble secret,

cannot minister from all her mines in the old or the new-found world; if

this be all so, is it not reasonable that to this I dedicate my future

life, secure, for a brief period of studious patience, to rise above the

mean dependence upon favourites, and THEIR favourites, by which I am now

enthralled!"




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