“Ah!” cried he, “all is over with me! all gone! all vanished! gone in a moment! the labour of a lifetime lost!”

His daughter attempted to soothe him, but he became slightly delirious, and raved incoherently about malignant demons, and about the habitation of the green lion being destroyed.  His wounds being dressed, and such other remedies administered as his situation required, he sunk into a state of quiet.  Antonio now turned his attention to the daughter, whose sufferings had been little inferior to those of her father.  Having with great difficulty succeeded in tranquillizing her fears, he endeavoured to prevail upon her to retire, and seek the repose so necessary to her frame, proffering to remain by her father until morning.  “I am a stranger,” said he, “it is true, and my offer may appear intrusive; but I see you are lonely and helpless, and I cannot help venturing over the limits of mere ceremony.  Should you feel any scruple or doubt, however, say but a word, and I will instantly retire.”

There was a frankness, a kindness, and a modesty, mingled in Antonio’s deportment, that inspired instant confidence; and his simple scholar’s garb was a recommendation in the house of poverty.  The females consented to resign the sufferer to his care, as they would be the better able to attend to him on the morrow.  On retiring, the old domestic was profuse in her benedictions; the daughter only looked her thanks; but as they shone through the tears that filled her fine black eyes, the student thought them a thousand times the most eloquent.

Here, then, he was, by a singular turn of chance, completely housed within this mysterious mansion.  When left to himself, and the bustle of the scene was over, his heart throbbed as he looked round the chamber in which he was sitting.  It was the daughter’s room, the promised land toward which he had cast so many a longing gaze.  The furniture was old, and had probably belonged to the building in its prosperous days; but every thing was arranged with propriety.  The flowers that he had seen her attend stood in the window; a guitar leaned against a table, on which stood a crucifix, and before it lay a missal and a rosary.  There reigned an air of purity and serenity about this little nestling-place of innocence; it was the emblem of a chaste and quiet mind.  Some few articles of female dress lay on the chairs; and there was the very bed on which she had slept—­the pillow on which her soft cheek had reclined!  The poor scholar was treading enchanted ground; for what fairy land has more of magic in it, than the bedchamber of innocence and beauty?

From various expressions of the old man in his ravings, and from what he had noticed on a subsequent visit to the tower, to see that the fire was extinguished, Antonio had gathered that his patient was an alchymist.  The philosopher’s stone was an object eagerly sought after by visionaries in those days; but in consequence of the superstitious prejudices of the times, and the frequent persecutions of its votaries, they were apt to pursue their experiments in secret; in lonely houses, in caverns and ruins, or in the privacy of cloistered cells.