powerful bellows, cumbered the hearth; before
this on a long table were ranged a profusion of phials and retorts,
glass vessels of odd shapes, and earthen pots. Crucibles and alembics
stood in the ashes before the stove, and on a sideboard placed under the
window were scattered a set of silver scales, a chemist's mask, and a
number of similar objects. Cards bearing abstruse calculations hung
everywhere on the walls; and over the fireplace, inscribed in gold and
black letters, the Greek word "EUREKA" was conspicuous.

The existence of such a room in the quiet house in the Corraterie was
little suspected by the neighbours, and if known would have struck them
with amazement. To Grio its aspect was familiar: but in this case
familiarity had not removed his awe of the unknown and the magical. He
looked about him now, and after a pause:--

"I suppose you do it--with these," he murmured, and with an almost
imperceptible shiver he pointed to the crucibles.

"With those?" Basterga exclaimed, and had the other ascribed
supernatural virtues to the cinders or the bellows he could not have
thrown greater scorn into his words. "Do you think I ply this base
mechanic art for aught but to profit by the ignorance of the vulgar? Or
think by pots and pans and mixing vile substances to make this, which by
nature is this, into that which by nature it is not! I, a scholar? A
scholar? No, I tell you, there was never alchemist yet could transmute
but one thing--poor into rich, rich into poor!"

"But," Grio murmured with a look and in a voice of disappointment, "is
not that the true transmutation which a thousand have died seeking, and
one here and there, it is rumoured, has found? From lead to gold, Messer
Basterga?"

"Ay, but the lead is the poor alchemist, who gets gold from his patron
by his trick. And the gold is the poor fool who finds him in his living,
and being sucked, turns to lead! There you have your transmutation."

"Yet----"

"There is no yet!"

"But Agrippa," Grio persisted, "Cornelius Agrippa, who sojourned here in
Geneva and of whom, master, you speak daily--was he not a learned man?"

"Ay, even as I am!" Caesar Basterga answered, swelling visibly with
pride. "But constrained, even as I am, to ply the baser trade and stoop
to that we see and touch and smell! Faugh! What lot more cursed than to
quit the pure ether of Latinity for the lower region of matter? And in
place of cultivating the _literae humaniores_, which is