all the
alchymists of the town, who kindly assisted him in spending his money. He
did not lose his faith in Geber, or patience with his hungry assistants,
until he had lost two thousand crowns--a very considerable sum in those
days.

Among all the crowd of pretended men of science who surrounded him, there
was but one as enthusiastic and as disinterested as himself. With this
man, who was a monk of the order of St. Francis, he contracted an intimate
friendship, and spent nearly all his time. Some obscure treatises of
Rupecissa and Sacrobosco having fallen into their hands, they were
persuaded, from reading them, that highly rectified spirits of wine was
the universal alkahest, or dissolvent, which would aid them greatly in the
process of transmutation. They rectified the alcohol thirty times, till
they made it so strong as to burst the vessels which contained it. After
they had worked three years, and spent three hundred crowns in the liquor,
they discovered that they were on the wrong track. They next tried alum
and copperas; but the great secret still escaped them. They afterwards
imagined that there was a marvellous virtue in all excrement, especially
the human, and actually employed more than two years in experimentalising
upon it with mercury, salt, and molten lead! Again the adepts flocked
around him from far and near to aid him with their counsels. He received
them all hospitably, and divided his wealth among them so generously and
unhesitatingly, that they gave him the name of the "Good Trevisan," by
which he is still often mentioned in works that treat on alchymy. For
twelve years he led this life, making experiments every day upon some new
substance, and praying to God night and morning that he might discover the
secret of transmutation.

In this interval he lost his friend the monk, and was joined by a
magistrate of the city of Treves, as ardent as himself in the search. His
new acquaintance imagined that the ocean was the mother of gold, and that
sea-salt would change lead or iron into the precious metals. Bernard
resolved to try; and, transporting his laboratory to a house on the shores
of the Baltic, he worked upon salt for more than a year, melting it,
sublimating it, crystallising it, and occasionally drinking it, for the
sake of other experiments. Still the strange enthusiast was not wholly
discouraged, and his failure in one trial only made him the more anxious
to attempt another.

He was now appro