to a more reasonable mind, it was too late. And so, in all the generations
since Friar Bacon's time, the Nortons have been born, and enjoyed their
young days, and worried through their manhood, and tottered through their
old age (unless taken off sooner by sword, arrow, ball, fever, or what
not), and died in their beds, like men that had no such option; and so
this old yellow paper has done not the least good to any mortal. Neither
do I see how it can do any good to you, since you know not the rules,
moral or dietetic, that are essential to its effect. But how did you come
by it?"

"It matters not how," said Septimius, gloomily. "Enough that I am its
rightful possessor and inheritor. Can you read these old characters?"

"Most of them," said the doctor; "but let me tell you, my young friend, I
have no faith whatever in this secret; and, having meddled with such
things myself, I ought to know. The old physicians and chemists had
strange ideas of the virtues of plants, drugs, and minerals, and equally
strange fancies as to the way of getting those virtues into action. They
would throw a hundred different potencies into a caldron together, and put
them on the fire, and expect to brew a potency containing all their
potencies, and having a different virtue of its own. Whereas, the most
likely result would be that they would counteract one another, and the
concoction be of no virtue at all; or else some more powerful ingredient
would tincture the whole."

He read the paper again, and continued:--

"I see nothing else so remarkable in this recipe, as that it is chiefly
made up of some of the commonest things that grow; plants that you set
your foot upon at your very threshold, in your garden, in your wood-walks,