eternity."

"Sir Philip Derval," said I, struggling against the appeals to fancy or to
awe, made in words so strange, uttered in a tone of earnest conviction,
and heard amidst the glare of the lightning, the howl of the winds, and
the roll of the thunder,--"Sir Philip Derval, you accost me in a language
which, but for my experience of the powers at your command, I should hear
with the contempt that is due to the vaunts of a mountebank, or the pity
we give to the morbid beliefs of his dupe. As it is, I decline the
confidence with which you would favour me, subject to the conditions which
it seems you would impose. My profession abandons to quacks all drugs
which may not be analyzed, all secrets which may not be fearlessly told.
I cannot visit you at Derval Court. I cannot trust myself, voluntarily,
again in the power of a man, who has arts of which I may not examine the
nature, by which he can impose on my imagination and steal away my
reason."

"Reflect well before you decide," said Sir Philip, with a solemnity that
was stern. "If you refuse to be warned and to be armed by me, your reason
and your imagination will alike be subjected to influences which I can
only explain by telling you that there is truth in those immemorial
legends which depose to the existence of magic."

"Magic!"

"There is magic of two kinds,--the dark and evil, appertaining to
witchcraft or necromancy; the pure and beneficent, which is but
philosophy, applied to certain mysteries in Nature remote from the beaten
tracks of science, but which deepened the wisdom of ancient sages, and can
yet unriddle the myths of departed races."