body was stretched on a long table. The embalmers had
laid a sheet over it, to hide from all eyes the dreadful spectacle of a
corpse so wasted and shrunken that it seemed like a skeleton, and only
the face was uncovered. This mummy-like figure lay in the middle of
the room. The limp clinging linen lent itself to the outlines it
shrouded--so sharp, bony, and thin. Large violet patches had already
begun to spread over the face; the embalmers' work had not been finished
too soon.

Don Juan, strong as he was in his scepticism, felt a tremor as he opened
the magic crystal flask. When he stood over that face, he was trembling
so violently, that he was actually obliged to wait for a moment. But Don
Juan had acquired an early familiarity with evil; his morals had been
corrupted by a licentious court, a reflection worthy of the Duke of
Urbino crossed his mind, and it was a keen sense of curiosity that
goaded him into boldness. The devil himself might have whispered the
words that were echoing through his brain, _Moisten one of the eyes with
the liquid_! He took up a linen cloth, moistened it sparingly with
the precious fluid, and passed it lightly over the right eyelid of the
corpse. The eye unclosed....

"Aha!" said Don Juan. He gripped the flask tightly, as we clutch in
dreams the branch from which we hang suspended over a precipice.

For the eye was full of life. It was a young child's eye set in a
death's head; the light quivered in the depths of its youthful liquid
brightness. Shaded by the long dark lashes, it sparkled like the strange
lights that travelers see in lonely places in winter nights. The eye
seemed as if it would fain dart fire at Don Juan; he saw it thinking,
upbraiding, condemning, uttering accusations, threatening doom; it cried
aloud, and gnashed upon him. All anguish that shakes human souls was
gathered there; supplications the most tender, the wrath of kings, the
love in a girl's heart pleading with the headsman; then, and after all
these, the deeply searching glance a man turns on his fellows as he
mounts the last step of the scaffold. Life so dilated in this fragment
of life that Don Juan shrank back; he walked up and down the room, he
dared not meet that gaze, but he saw nothing else. The ceiling and
the hangings, the whole room was sown with living points of fire and
intelligence. Everywhere those gleaming eyes haunted him.

"He might very likely have lived another hundred years!" he cried
involu