It was a gracious gift to be once more alone.

I seemed awakened from a dream of pining exultation, of dark foreboding.  Without acknowledging it to myself, I had been strangely wrought upon by what I had read and heard.  As Clifton emerged from the magical influence of Vannelle, was it not concentrated upon me?  The impulse to return to the perusal of the manuscript was almost irresistible.  Yet it was evident, that, failing to receive as my very life what was there written, I should become hopelessly entangled in discrepancies and contradictions.  A glance at the imminent peril sent me shuddering to my only safety.

It has been mentioned that I had interested myself in some inquiries tending to modify the received understanding of a certain natural law.  During my morning in the College Library I had collected the records of many facts, which, laboriously compared, might confirm the hypothesis I had conceived.  I now braced myself to the task of tracing an order in these random observations.  I was soon stimulated by perceiving that my statistics seemed to confirm the justice of the reasoning which at first roused my suspicion.  More and more plainly did man’s experience respond to the results I had dared to predict.  Trivial circumstances, noted in remote times and disconnected places, pointed in one direction, and there beat the regular pulse of Nature.

It is perhaps a little humiliating to mention, what I afterwards discovered, that the doctrine which I endeavored to reach had been already conceived and passed upon by a not very eminent scientist in one of the Western States.  But at that time absorption in the search for attainable truth was necessary to my welfare; and, with very brief intervals for rest and refreshment, I continued my pursuit until the afternoon-hour for visiting the library.

The President and Treasurer entered the building at five o’clock.

For some minutes I had stood before the massive doors of the Mather Safe, wondering if any of its mysterious contents could be more singular than the consignment about to be made to its keeping.

“Is Mr. Clifton of Foxden in the library?” inquired the President.

“I am here to represent him,” I replied.  “He made a strange mistake in the day of appointment, and was compelled to leave town this morning.  The package which he wished to deposit in the Mather Safe I hold in my hand.”

“Lex Universalis Naturae; THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSOLUTE,” exclaimed the Treasurer, reading the inscription upon the outer parchment.  “Poh, poh!  I thought that sort of philosophy had long ago been handed over to the limbo of fallacies.”

“By those who have neither feeling nor imagination enough to care for anything not transmutable into dollars, perhaps it has,” I rejoined, somewhat tartly.

“Come, come!” said the President, in his good-natured, rolling tones; “since the days of the great Jonathan, our New-England metaphysicians have generally been broken-down poets, and should be treated with the greatest tenderness.  Some flighty minds will prefer dangerous trips to dream-land to the rigid demonstrations of figures; but the mass of our graduates accept the teaching of their Alma Mater, that only the mathematician has the right to investigate, and that of all philosophers only natural philosophers are competent instructors.”