a world of fiction which was not represented on the
shelves of the library proper, unless perhaps by Coelebs in Search of a
Wife, or allegories of the bitter tonic class, as the young doctor that
sits on the other side of the table would probably call them. I always,
from an early age, had a keen eye for a story with a moral sticking out
of it, and gave it a wide berth, though in my later years I have myself
written a couple of "medicated novels," as one of my dearest and
pleasantest old friends wickedly called them, when somebody asked her if
she had read the last of my printed performances. I forgave the satire
for the charming esprit of the epithet. Besides the works I have
mentioned, there was an old, old Latin alchemy book, with the manuscript
annotations of some ancient Rosicrucian, in the pages of which I had a
vague notion that I might find the mighty secret of the Lapis
Philosophorum, otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green Lion, the
Quinta Essentia, the Soap of Sages, the Vinegar of Philosophers, the Dew
of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all
manner of odd aliases, as I am assured by the plethoric little book
before me, in parchment covers browned like a meerschaum with the smoke
of furnaces and the thumbing of dead gold seekers, and the fingering of
bony-handed book-misers, and the long intervals of dusty slumber on the
shelves of the bouquiniste; for next year it will be three centuries old,
and it had already seen nine generations of men when I caught its eye
(Alchemiae Doctrina) and recognized it at pistol-shot distance as a
prize, among the breviaries and Heures and trumpery volumes of the old
open-air dealer who exposed his treasures under the shadow of St.
Sulpice. I have never lost my taste for alchemy since I first got hold
of the Palladium Spagyricum of Peter John Faber, and sought--in vain, it
is true--through its pages for a clear, intelligible, and practical
statement of how I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights of tall
kitchen clock into good yellow gold, specific gravity 19.2, and
exchangeable for whatever I then wanted, and for many more things than I
was then aware of. One of the greatest pleasures of childhood found in
the mysteries which it hides from the skepticism of the elders, and works
up into small mythologies of its own. I have seen all this played over
again in adult life,--the same delightful bewilderment semi-emotional
belief in lis