moles.

"What, then," my lips kept repeating,--"what if Nature do hide a secret by
which the life of my life can be saved? What do we know of the secrets of
Nature? What said Newton himself of his knowledge? 'I am like a child
picking up pebbles and shells on the sand, while the great ocean of Truth
lies all undiscovered around me!' And did Newton himself, in the ripest
growth of his matchless intellect, hold the creed of the alchemists in
scorn? Had he not given to one object of their research, in the
transmutation of metals, his days and his nights? Is there proof that he
ever convinced himself that the research was the dream, which we, who are
not Newtons, call it?[1] And that other great sage, inferior only to
Newton--the calculating doubt-weigher, Descartes--had he not believed in
the yet nobler hope of the alchemists,--believed in some occult nostrum or
process by which human life could attain to the age of the Patriarchs?"[2]

In thoughts like these the night wore away, the moonbeams that streamed
through my window lighting up the spacious solitudes beyond,--mead and
creek, forest-land, mountaintop,--and the silence without broken by the
wild cry of the night hawk and the sibilant melancholy dirge of the
shining chrysococyx,[3]--bird that never sings but at night, and
obstinately haunts the roofs of the sick and dying, ominous of woe and
death.

But up sprang the sun, and, chasing these gloomy sounds, out burst the
wonderful chorus of Australian groves, the great kingfisher opening the
jocund melodious babble with the glee of his social laugh.

And now I heard Faber's step in Lilian's room,--heard through the door her
soft voice, though I could not distinguish the words. It was not long