chior'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 then, and even the
graves of Dr. Melchior and his beautiful wife Bianca have disappeared,
owing to the removal of the burying-ground.

On the other hand the portrait in red crayon of Frau Bianca and the
little Zeno is still carefully preserved as a most precious heirloom,
and was the picture that inspired my sainted father with the desire to
become an artist.

Our forebear Dr. Melchior devoted the best of his energies to the
benefit, as he thought, of his race, perhaps indeed of all mankind, and
yet his efforts were unavailing,