Germany, in Poland, in Italy, and in the farther Tartary, as one to whom nature has unveiled her darkest secrets; if I have acquired the most secret signs and passwords of the Jewish Cabala, so that the greyest beard in the synagogue would brush the steps to make them clean for me;—­if all this is so, and if there remains but one step—­one little step—­betwixt my long, deep, and dark, and subterranean progress, and that blaze of light which shall show Nature watching her richest and her most glorious productions in the very cradle—­one step betwixt dependence and the power of sovereignty—­one step betwixt poverty and such a sum of wealth as earth, without that noble secret, cannot minister from all her mines in the old or the new-found world; if this be all so, is it not reasonable that to this I dedicate my future life, secure, for a brief period of studious patience, to rise above the mean dependence upon favourites, and their favourites, by which I am now enthralled!”

“Now, bravo! bravo! my good father,” said Varney, with the usual sardonic expression of ridicule on his countenance; “yet all this approximation to the philosopher’s stone wringeth not one single crown out of my Lord Leicester’s pouch, and far less out of Richard Varney’s.  We must have earthly and substantial services, man, and care not whom else thou canst delude with thy philosophical charlatanry.”

“My son Varney,” said the alchemist, “the unbelief, gathered around thee like a frost-fog, hath dimmed thine acute perception to that which is a stumbling-block to the wise, and which yet, to him who seeketh knowledge with humility, extends a lesson so clear that he who runs may read.  Hath not Art, thinkest thou, the means of completing Nature’s imperfect concoctions in her attempts to form the precious metals, even as by art we can perfect those other operations of incubation, distillation, fermentation, and similar processes of an ordinary description, by which we extract life itself out of a senseless egg, summon purity and vitality out of muddy dregs, or call into vivacity the inert substance of a sluggish liquid?”

“I have heard all this before,” said Varney, “and my heart is proof against such cant ever since I sent twenty good gold pieces (marry, it was in the nonage of my wit) to advance the grand magisterium, all which, God help the while, vanished in FUMO.  Since that moment, when I paid for my freedom, I defy chemistry, astrology, palmistry, and every other occult art, were it as secret as hell itself, to unloose the stricture of my purse-strings.  Marry, I neither defy the manna of Saint Nicholas, nor can I dispense with it.  The first task must be to prepare some when thou gett’st down to my little sequestered retreat yonder, and then make as much gold as thou wilt.”

“I will make no more of that dose,” said the alchemist, resolutely.