ste it. I put in everything that
ought to make it very good."

All exclaimed over it.

Then it became impossible to hear oneself. Tonight the bell boomed out
with unusual clarity and power. Durtal tried to analyze the sound which
seemed to rock the room. There was a sort of flux and reflux of sound.
First, the formidable shock of the clapper against the vase, then a sort
of crushing and scattering of the sounds as if ground fine with the
pestle, then a rounding of the reverberation; then the recoil of the
clapper, adding, in the bronze mortar, other sonorous vibrations which
it ground up and cast out and dispersed through the sounding shutters.

Then the bell strokes came further apart. Now there was only the
whirring as of a spinning wheel; a few crumbs were slow about falling.
And now Carhaix returned.

"It's a two-sided age," said Gevingey, pensive. "People believe nothing,
yet gobble everything. Every day a new science is invented. Nobody reads
that admirable Paracelsus who rediscovered all that had ever been found
and created everything that had not. Say now to your congress of
scientists that, according to this great master, life is a drop of the
essence of the stars, that each of our organs corresponds to a planet
and depends upon it; that we are, in consequence, a foreshortening of
the divine sphere. Tell them--and this, experience attests--that every
man born under the sign of Saturn is melancholy and pituitous, taciturn
and solitary, poor and vain; that that sluggish star predisposes to
superstition and fraud, directs epilepsies and varices, hemorrhoids and
leprosies; that it is, alas! the great purveyor to hospital and
prison--and the scientists will shrug their shoulders and laugh at you.
The glorified pedants and homiletic asses!"

"Paracelsus," said Des Hermies, "was one of the most extraordinary
practitioners of occult medicine. He knew the now forgotten mysteries of
the blood, the still unknown medical effects of light. Professing--as
did also the cabalists, for that matter--that the human being is
composed of three parts, a material body, a soul, and a perispirit
called also an astral body, he attended this last especially and
produced reactions on the carnal envelope by procedures which are either
incomprehensible or fallen into disuse. He cared for wounds by treating
not the tissues, but the blood which came out of them. However, we are
assured that he healed certain ailments."

"Thanks to his