t the Rathhaus long after hours, he would go home
alone, and no one sought him out to pass an hour in his company, for
everyone feared the rough and brutal frankness of his speech. The
gregarious and friendly notary used to wince when he heard his adopted
son spoken of as "the hard Ueberhell," or "the sinner's scourge," and he
tried his best to make him more human, and to draw him within his circle
of friends.

When death overtook Herr Winckler, from whose mouth Zeno used to hear
many bitter tirades against the elixir, and Melchior's son found himself
entirely alone, and making always more enemies by his irrepressible
instinct to speak out what he thought to be the truth, he would sometimes
ask himself if it were not better to destroy the elixir, which had
brought him nothing but misery, and thus to spare his son and succeeding
generations.

But the stern upholder of the law did not feel that he had the right to
disobey the instructions of his father. And so the elixir descended to
his son, and was given to him on his twenty-fifth birthday by his
guardian, for Zeno died before his only child reached that age.

What happened to this second Melchior Ueberhell whose unfortunate
history. . . . Here the story broke off. The son of one of my friends had
found it in an old chest, when he was playing in the attic of The Three
Kings. It was written in a discoloured blank-book, which had escaped the
devastations of the mice and insects, because it had lain under a pile of
aromatic herbs and drugs that had probably belonged to the shop of the
Court apothecary.

Between the last page and the cover of the blank-book, which was confided
to me, I found a continuation by a later Ueberhell.

This appendix could hardly have been written earlier than towards the end
of the last century, to judge by the paper, the stiff, old-fashioned
handwriting and, more surely still, by the fact that the writer mentions
vaccination as a new discovery. Inoculation was first tried in 1796, and
three years later an institution was opened in London where a Leipsic
professor of medicine gave lectures.

This communication is signed: "Doctor Ernst Ueberhell, Professor of
Medicine." And runs as follows:

Several centuries have passed since the time of the ancestor to whom we
owe the wonderful history of the elixir as written in this book, and
preserved from generation to generation in our family.

Many Ueberhells have closed their eyes forever, since t