"Is it not easier to so accomplished a sage as you to believe that the
idlers of Paris have guessed the true solution of that problem, my place
on this earth? May I not be the love-son of Louis Grayle? And when
Haroun refused the elixir to him, or he found that his frame was too far
exhausted for even the elixir to repair organic lesions of structure in
the worn frame of old age, may he not have indulged the common illusion of
fathers, and soothed his death-pangs with the thought that he should live
again in his son? Haroun is found dead on his carpet--rumour said
strangled. What proof of the truth of that rumour? Might he not have
passed away in a fit? Will it lessen your perplexity if I state
recollections? They are vague,--they often perplex myself; but so far
from a wish to deceive you, my desire is to relate them so truthfully that
you may aid me to reduce them into more definite form."

His face now became very troubled, the tone of his voice very
irresolute,--the face and the voice of a man who is either blundering his
way through an intricate falsehood, or through obscure reminiscences.

"This Louis Grayle! this Louis Grayle! I remember him well, as one
remembers a nightmare. Whenever I look back, before the illness of which
I will presently speak, the image of Louis Grayle returns to me. I see
myself with him in African wilds, commanding the fierce Abyssinians. I
see myself with him in the fair Persian valley,-lofty, snow-covered
mountains encircling the garden of roses. I see myself with him in the
hush of the golden noon, reclined by the spray of cool fountains,--now
listening to cymbals and lutes, now arguing with graybeards on secrets
bequeathed by the Chaldees,--with him, with him in moonlit nights,
stealing into the sepulchres of mythical kings. I see myself with him in
the aisles of dark caverns, surrounded by awful shapes, which have no
likeness amongst the creatures of earth. Louis Grayle! Louis Grayle! all