he Rosicrucians, proudly.

"So much the better for you," said Marie, "for your laboratory, and your
retorts and phials are now being searched by order of the king."

The brothers looked at each other smiling. Marie Touchet took that smile
for one of innocence, though it really signified: "Poor fools! can they
suppose that if we brew poisons, we do not hide them?"

"Where are the king's searchers?"

"In Rene's laboratory," replied Marie.

Again the brothers glanced at each other with a look which said: "The
hotel de Soissons is inviolable."

The king had so completely forgotten his suspicions that when, as he
took his boy in his arms, Jacob gave him a note from Chapelain, he
opened it with the certainty of finding in his physician's report
that nothing had been discovered in the laboratory but what related
exclusively to alchemy.

"Will he live a happy man?" asked the king, presenting his son to the
two alchemists.

"That is a question which concerns Cosmo," replied Lorenzo, signing his
brother.

Cosmo took the tiny hand of the child, and examined it carefully.

"Monsieur," said Charles IX. to the old man, "if you find it necessary
to deny the existence of the soul in order to believe in the possibility
of your enterprise, will you explain to my why you should doubt what
your power does? Thought, which you seek to nullify, is the certainty,
the torch which lights your researches. Ha! ha! is not that the motion
of a spirit within you, while you deny such motion?" cried the king,
pleased with his argument, and looking triumphantly at his mistress.

"Thought," replied Lorenzo Ruggiero, "is the exercise of an inward
sense; just as the faculty of seeing several objects and noticing their
size and color is an effect of sight. It has no connection with what
people choose to call another life. Thought is a faculty which ceases,
with the forces which produced it, when we cease to breathe."

"You are logical," said the king, surprised. "But alchemy must therefore
be an atheistical science.'

"A materialist science, sire, which is a very different thing.
Materialism is the outcome of Indian doctrines, transmitted through
the mysteries of Isis to Chaldea and Egypt, and brought to Greece
by Pythagoras, one of the demigods of humanity. His doctrine of
re-incarnation is the mathematics of materialism, the vital law of its
phases. To each of the different creations which form the terrestrial
creation belongs the power of