he purposed keeping him as a guest, that night, at least.

"I owe you a dinner," said he, "and will pay it with a supper and
knowledge; and before we part I have certain inquiries to make, of which
you may not at first see the object, but yet are not quite purposeless. My
familiar, up aloft there, has whispered me something about you, and I rely
greatly on his intimations."

Septimius, who was sufficiently common-sensible, and invulnerable to
superstitious influences on every point except that to which he had
surrendered himself, was easily prevailed upon to stay; for he found the
singular, charlatanic, mysterious lore of the man curious, and he had
enough of real science to at least make him an object of interest to one
who knew nothing of the matter; and Septimius's acuteness, too, was piqued
in trying to make out what manner of man he really was, and how much in
him was genuine science and self-belief, and how much quackery and
pretension and conscious empiricism. So he stayed, and supped with the
doctor at a table heaped more bountifully, and with rarer dainties, than
Septimius had ever before conceived of; and in his simpler cognizance,
heretofore, of eating merely to live, he could not but wonder to see a man
of thought caring to eat of more than one dish, so that most of the meal,
on his part, was spent in seeing the doctor feed and hearing him discourse
upon his food.

"If man lived only to eat," quoth the doctor, "one life would not suffice,
not merely to exhaust the pleasure of it, but even to get the rudiments of
it."

When this important business was over, the doctor and his guest sat down
again in his laboratory, where the former took care to have his usual