its service beings that dwell in the earth and the air and the deep--has
ever been one of the same peril which an invader must brave when he
crosses the bounds of his nation. By this key alone you unlock all the
cells of the alchemist's lore; by this alone understand how a labour,
which a chemist's crudest apprentice could perform, has baffled the giant
fathers of all your dwarfed children of science. Nature, that stores this
priceless boon, seems to shrink from conceding it to man; the invisible
tribes that abhor him, oppose themselves to the gain that might give them
a master. The duller of those who were the life-seekers of old would have
told you how some chance, trivial, unlooked-for, foiled their grand hope
at the very point of fruition,--some doltish mistake, some improvident
oversight, a defect in the sulphur, a wild overflow in the quicksilver, or
a flaw in the bellows, or a pupil who failed to replenish the fuel, by
falling asleep by the furnace. The invisible foes seldom vouchsafe to
make themselves visible where they can frustrate the bungler, as they mock
at his toils from their ambush. But the mightier adventurers, equally
foiled in despite of their patience and skill, would have said, 'Not with
us rests the fault; we neglected no caution, we failed from no oversight.
But out from the caldron dread faces arose, and the spectres or demons
dismayed and baffled us.' Such, then, is the danger which seems so
appalling to a son of the East, as it seemed to a sees in the dark age of
Europe. But we can deride all its threats, you and I. For myself, I own
frankly I take all the safety that the charms and resources of magic
bestow. You, for your safety, have the cultured and disciplined reason
which reduces all fantasies to nervous impressions; and I rely on the
courage of one who has questioned, unquailing, the Luminous Shadow, and
wrested from the hand of the magician himself the wand which concentred
the wonders of will!"

To this strange and long discourse I listened without interruption, and