The men who had seized upon the alchymist had, at least, been more honest in their professions.  They were, indeed, familiars of the inquisition.  He was conducted in silence to the gloomy prison of that horrible tribunal.  It was a mansion whose very aspect withered joy, and almost shut out hope.  It was one of those hideous abodes which the bad passions of men conjure up in this fair world, to rival the fancied dens of demons and the accursed.

Day after day went heavily by, without anything to mark the lapse of time, but the decline and reappearance of the light that feebly glimmered through the narrow window of the dungeon in which the unfortunate alchymist was buried rather than confined.  His mind was harassed with uncertainties and fears about his daughter, so helpless and inexperienced.  He endeavoured to gather tidings of her from the man who brought his daily portion of food.  The fellow stared, as if astonished at being asked a question in that mansion of silence and mystery, but departed without saying a word.  Every succeeding attempt was equally fruitless.

The poor alchymist was oppressed by many griefs; and it was not the least, that he had been again interrupted in his labours on the very point of success.  Never was alchymist so near attaining the golden secret—­a little longer, and all his hopes would have been realized.  The thoughts of these disappointments afflicted him more even than the fear of all that he might suffer from the merciless inquisition.  His waking thoughts would follow him into his dreams.  He would be transported in fancy to his laboratory, busied again among retorts and alembics, and surrounded by Lully, by D’Abano, by Olybius, and the other masters of the sublime art.  The moment of projection would arrive; a seraphic form would rise out of the furnace, holding forth a vessel containing the precious elixir; but, before he could grasp the prize, he would awake, and find himself in a dungeon.

All the devices of inquisitorial ingenuity were employed to ensnare the old man, and to draw from him evidence that might be brought against himself, and might corroborate certain secret information that had been given against him.  He had been accused of practising necromancy and judicial astrology, and a cloud of evidence had been secretly brought forward to substantiate the charge.  It would be tedious to enumerate all the circumstances, apparently corroborative, which had been industriously cited by the secret accuser.  The silence which prevailed about the tower, its desolateness, the very quiet of its inhabitants, had been adduced as proofs that something sinister was perpetrated within.  The alchymist’s conversations and soliloquies in the garden had been overheard and misrepresented.  The lights and strange appearances at night, in the tower, were given with violent exaggerations.  Shrieks and yells were said to have been heard from thence at midnight, when, it was confidently asserted, the old man raised familiar spirits by his incantations, and even compelled the dead to rise from their graves, and answer to his questions.