bartered his crown, with its brain-ache of care, for the radiance that
circled my brows, flashing out from the light that was in me? Oh again,
oh again! to enjoy the freedom of air with the bird, and the glow of the
sun with the lizard; to sport through the blooms of the earth, Nature's
playmate and darling; to face, in the forest and desert, the pard and the
lion,--Nature's bravest and fiercest,--her firstborn, the heir of her
realm, with the rest of her children for slaves!"

As these words burst from his lips, there was a wild grandeur in the
aspect of this enigmatical being which I had never beheld in the former
time of his affluent, dazzling youth. And, indeed, in his language, and
in the thoughts it clothed, there was an earnestness, a concentration, a
directness, a purpose, which had seemed wanting to his desultory talk in
the earlier days I expected that reaction of languor and exhaustion would
follow his vehement outbreak of passion, but, after a short pause, he went
on with steady accents. His will was sustaining his strength. He was
determined to force his convictions on me, and the vitality, once so rich,
rallied all its lingering forces to the aid of its intense desire.

"I tell you, then," he resumed, with deliberate calmness, "that, years
ago, I tested in my own person that essence which is the sovereign
medicament. In me, as you saw me at L----, you beheld the proof of its
virtues. Feeble and ill as I am now, my state was incalculably more
hopeless when formerly restored by the elixir. He from whom I then took
the sublime restorative died without revealing the secret of its
composition. What I obtained was only just sufficient to recruit the lamp
of my life, then dying down--and no drop was left for renewing the light
which wastes its own rays in the air that it gilds. Though the Dervish
would not sell me his treasure, he permitted me to see it. The appearance
and odour of this essence are strangely peculiar,--unmistakable by one who