experiment, he
poured into the palm of my hand a little pool of quicksilver, and
placing me under a powerful shaded lamp, so that a ray of light caught
the mercury pool, he told me to look at the bright spot for a quarter
of an hour, remaining motionless meanwhile. Any one who has shared this
experience with me, knows how the speck of light flashes and grows
until that little pool of quicksilver seems to fill the entire horizon,
darting out gleaming rays like an Aurora Borealis. I felt myself
growing dazed and hypnotised, when Sir Charles emptied the mercury from
my hand, and commenced making passes over me, looking, with his slender
build and his white hair and beard, like a real mediaeval magician.
"Now you can neither speak nor move," he cried at length. "I think I
can do both, Sir Charles," I answered, as I got out of the chair. He
tried me on another occasion, and then gave me up. I was clearly not a
"sensitive."

Sir Charles had quite a library of occult books, from which I
endeavoured to glean a little knowledge, and great rubbish most of them
were. Raymond Lully, Basil Valentine, Paracelsus, and Van Helmont; they
were all there, in French, German, Latin, and English. The Alchemists
had two obsessions: one was the discovery of the Elixir of Life, by the
aid of which you could live forever; the other that of the
Philosopher's Stone, which had the property of transmuting everything
it touched into gold. Like practical men, they seemed to have
concentrated their energies more especially on the latter, for a
moment's consideration will show the exceedingly awkward predicament in
which any one would be placed with only the first of these conveniences
at his command. Should he by the aid of the Elixir of Life have managed
to attain the age of, say, 300 years, he might find it excessively hard
to obtain any remunerative employment at that time of life; whereas
with the Philosopher's Stone in his pocket, he would only have to touch
the door-scraper outside his house to find it immediately transmuted
into the purest gold. In case of pressing need, he could extend the
process with like result to his area railings, which ought to be enough
to keep the wolf from the door for some little while even at the
present-day scale of prices.

Basil Valentine, the German Benedictine monk and alchemist, who wrote a
book which he quaintly termed The Triumphant Wagon, in praise of the
healing properties of antimony, actually thought th