month to the experiment I wish 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 is extracted by ferment can be 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 not to be 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
graybeard--granting, what rests on no proofs, that some of the
alchemists reached an age rarely given to man. But it is not in