Great travell hath the gentle Calidore And toyle endured...  There on a day,—­He chaunst to spy a sort of shepheard groomes, Playing on pipes and caroling apace. ...He, there besyde Saw a faire damzell.  —­Spenser, “Faerie Queene,” cant. ix.

For a considerable period the pupil of Mejnour was now absorbed in labour dependent on the most vigilant attention, on the most minute and subtle calculation.  Results astonishing and various rewarded his toils and stimulated his interest.  Nor were these studies limited to chemical discovery,—­in which it is permitted me to say that the greatest marvels upon the organisation of physical life seemed wrought by experiments of the vivifying influence of heat.  Mejnour professed to find a link between all intellectual beings in the existence of a certain all-pervading and invisible fluid resembling electricity, yet distinct from the known operations of that mysterious agency—­a fluid that connected thought to thought with the rapidity and precision of the modern telegraph, and the influence of this fluid, according to Mejnour, extended to the remotest past,—­that is to say, whenever and wheresoever man had thought.  Thus, if the doctrine were true, all human knowledge became attainable through a medium established between the brain of the individual inquirer and all the farthest and obscurest regions in the universe of ideas.  Glyndon was surprised to find Mejnour attached to the abstruse mysteries which the Pythagoreans ascribed to the occult science of numbers.  In this last, new lights glimmered dimly on his eyes; and he began to perceive that even the power to predict, or rather to calculate, results, might by—­ (Here there is an erasure in the Ms.)

....

But he observed that the last brief process by which, in each of these experiments, the wonder was achieved, Mejnour reserved for himself, and refused to communicate the secret.  The answer he obtained to his remonstrances on this head was more stern than satisfactory: 

“Dost thou think,” said Mejnour, “that I would give to the mere pupil, whose qualities are not yet tried, powers that might change the face of the social world?  The last secrets are intrusted only to him of whose virtue the Master is convinced.  Patience!  It is labour itself that is the great purifier of the mind; and by degrees the secrets will grow upon thyself as thy mind becomes riper to receive them.”

At last Mejnour professed himself satisfied with the progress made by his pupil.  “The hour now arrives,” he said, “when thou mayst pass the great but airy barrier,—­when thou mayst gradually confront the terrible Dweller of the Threshold.  Continue thy labours—­continue to surpass thine impatience for results until thou canst fathom the causes.  I leave thee for one month; if at the end of that period, when I return, the tasks set thee are completed, and thy mind prepared by contemplation and austere thought for the ordeal, I promise thee the ordeal shall commence.  One caution alone I give thee:  regard it as a peremptory command, enter not this chamber!” (They were then standing in the room where their experiments had been chiefly made, and in which Glyndon, on the night he had sought the solitude of the mystic, had nearly fallen a victim to his intrusion.)