Margrave; but the clock on the mantelpiece met my eyes as I turned them
wistfully round the room; and I was indeed amazed to perceive that five
minutes had sufficed for all which it has taken me so long to narrate, and
which in their transit had hurried me through ideas and emotions so remote
from anterior experience.

To my astonishment now succeeded shame and indignation,--shame that I, who
had scoffed at the possibility of the comparatively credible influences of
mesmeric action, should have been so helpless a puppet under the hand of
the slight fellow-man beside me, and so morbidly impressed by
phantasmagorieal illusions; indignation that, by some fumes which had
special potency over the brain, I had thus been, as it were, conjured out
of my senses; and looking full into the calm face at my side, I said, with
a smile to which I sought to convey disdain,--

"I congratulate you, Sir Philip Derval, on having learned in your travels
in the East so expert a familiarity with the tricks of its jugglers."

"The East has a proverb," answered Sir Philip, quietly, "that the juggler
may learn much from the dervish, but the dervish can learn nothing from
the juggler. You will pardon me, however, for the effect produced on you
for a few minutes, whatever the cause of it may be, since it may serve to
guard your whole life from calamities, to which it might otherwise have
been exposed. And however you may consider that which you have just
experienced to be a mere optical illusion, or the figment of a brain
super-excited by the fumes of a vapour, look within yourself, and tell me
if you do not feel an inward and unanswerable conviction that there is
more reason to shun and to fear the creature you left asleep under the
dead jaws of the giant serpent, than there would be in the serpent itself,
could hunger again move its coils, and venom again arm its fangs."