Then he put the child in Frau Schimmel’s arms and hurried into the laboratory as fast as his tired feet could carry him.  There he blew the bellows so violently that the housekeeper looked at him with silent indignation.  When all was prepared he poured the liquid into a crucible, set it among the glowing and sparkling coals and murmured strange words and spells over the seething fluid until it boiled up and the hissing bubbles ran over the rim of the crucible.  Then he stood the hot vessel in cold water, pronounced one more incantation over it, held it before a mirror—­the symbol of the Spirit of Truth and the emblem which she is always represented as carrying in her right hand—­and poured the liquid back into the phial.  Beads of perspiration stood on his forehead, his eyes gleamed with excitement, and he breathed heavily as he approached his son to try the power of the new elixir on him.

But something most unexpected happened:  Frau Schimmel, usually so timid, pressed the boy’s face against her breast and, her good gray eyes flashing with her angry determination to resist, cried out “Do with your elixir what you will, only leave me the child in peace!  Little Zeno speaks the truth without any of your mixtures.  A child’s mind is a holy thing, so his mother who is now an angel would tell you, and I—­I will not permit you to misuse it, in order to try your arts upon it!”

And stranger yet!  The doctor accepted this rebuff and did not even reprove the old lady for her disrespectful opposition, he only answered. with calm certainty:  “Neither the child nor any one else is needed to make the experiment.”

He inhaled the contents of the phial himself, in long breaths, staring for some time thoughtfully at the floor and then at the arches of the ceiling.  His chest rose and fell heavily, and he wiped the perspiration now and then from his damp brow.  Frau Schimmel watched him anxiously, and she could not say whether he looked more like a madman or a saint as he finally lifted his arms towards heaven and cried:  “I have found it, Father, Bianca!—­I have found it!”

Frau Schimmel left him alone and put the child to bed.  When she returned to the laboratory and found the doctor in the same place where she had left him, she said modestly:  “Here I am and if it pleases the Herr Doctor to try the elixir on so humble a person as myself, I am at his service.  Only one favour would I ask:  would the Herr Doctor be so kind as not to ask questions about Schimmel and myself or any member of the honoured Ueberhell family.”

But the doctor hesitated awhile before accepting this offer, for he had not forgotten the defiant words with which she had withheld his child from him only a short time before, and moreover the trial which he had made on himself had assured him of the success of his discovery; having inhaled the essence it had seemed to him as if the burden of oppression had been suddenly lifted from his mind.  And when he turned to the introspection of himself, and questioned his own heart, he found so many spots and defects on what he had hitherto considered faultless, that he was confirmed in the belief that he had seen the true reflection of his own personality for the first time.