“You have neglected me.  My strength is waning.  Give me more of the cordial, for we have work before us tonight, and I need support.”

He took for granted my assent to his wild experiment; and he was right.

I administered the cordial.  I placed food before him, and this time he did not eat with repugnance.  I poured out wine, and he drank it sparingly, but with ready compliance, saying, “In perfect health, I looked upon wine as poison; now it is like a foretaste of the glorious elixir.”

After he had thus recruited himself, he seemed to acquire an energy that startlingly contrasted with his languor the day before; the effort of breathing was scarcely perceptible; the color came back to his cheeks; his bended frame rose elastic and erect.

“If I understood you rightly,” said I, “the experiment you ask me to aid can be accomplished in a single night?”

“In a single night—­this night.”

“Command me.  Why not begin at once?  What apparatus or chemical agencies do you need?”

“Ah!” said Margrave.  “Formerly, how I was misled!  Formerly, how my conjectures blundered!  I thought, when I asked you to give a month to the experiment I wish to make, that I should need the subtlest skill of the chemist.  I then believed, with Van Helmont, that the principle of life is a gas, and that the secret was but in the mode by which the gas might be rightly administered.  But now, all that I need is contained in this coffer, save one very simple material—­fuel sufficient for a steady fire for six hours.  I see even that is at hand, piled up in your outhouse.  And now for the substance itself—­to that you must guide me.”

“Explain.”

“Near this very spot is there not gold—­in mines yet undiscovered—­ and gold of the purest metal?”

“There is.  What then?  Do you, with the alchemists, blend in one discovery, gold and life?”

“No.  But it is only where the chemistry of earth or of man produces gold, that the substance from which the great pabulum of life is extracted by ferment can be found.  Possibly, in the attempts at that transmutation of metals, which I think your own great chemist, Sir Humphry Davy, allowed might be possible, but held not to be worth the cost of the process—­possibly, in those attempts, some scanty grains of this substance were found by the alchemists, in the crucible, with grains of the metal as niggardly yielded by pitiful mimicry of Nature’s stupendous laboratory; and from such grains enough of the essence might, perhaps, have been drawn forth, to add a few years of existence to some feeble graybeard—­granting, what rests on no proofs, that some of the alchemists reached an age rarely given to man.  But it is not in the miserly crucible, it is in the matrix of Nature herself, that we must seek in prolific abundance Nature’s grand principle—­life.  As the loadstone is rife with the magnetic virtue, as amber contains the electric, so in this substance, to which we yet want a name, is found the bright life-giving fluid.  In the old gold mines of Asia and Europe the substance exists, but can rarely be met with.  The soil for its nutriment may there be well nigh exhausted.  It is here, where Nature herself is all vital with youth, that the nutriment of youth must be sought.  Near this spot is gold; guide me to it.”