had any success?" I said. "Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A French
alchemist said it had the right smell and the right colour" (the alchemist
may have been Eliphas Levi, who visited England in the 'sixties, and would
have said anything) "but the first effect of the elixir is that your nails
fall out and your hair falls off. I was afraid that I might have made a
mistake and that nothing else might happen, so I put it away on a shelf. I
meant to drink it when I was an old man, but when I got it down the other
day it had all dried up."

Soon after my first meeting with Mathers he emerged into brief prosperity,
becoming for two or three years Curator of a private museum at Forest
Hill, and marrying a young and beautiful wife, the sister of the
philosopher, Henri Bergson. His house at Forest Hill was soon a romantic
place to a little group, Florence Farr, myself, and some dozen fellow
students. I think that it was she, her curiosity being insatiable, who
first brought news of that house and that she brought it in mockery and in
wonder. Mathers had taken her for a walk through a field of sheep and had
said, "Look at the sheep. I am going to imagine myself a ram," and at once
all the sheep ran after him; another day he had tried to quell a thunder
storm by making symbols in the air with a masonic sword, but the storm had
not been quelled; and then came the crowning wonder. He had given her a
piece of cardboard on which was a coloured geometrical symbol and had told
her to hold it to her forehead and she had found herself walking upon a
cliff above the sea, seagulls shrieking overhead. I did not think the ram
story impossible, and even tried half a dozen times to excite a cat by
imagining a mouse in front of its nose, but still some chance movement of
the flock might have deceived her. But what could have deceived her in
that final marvel? Then another brought a like report, and presently my
own turn came. He gave me a cardboard symbol and I closed my eyes. Sight
came slowly, there was not that sudden miracle as if the darkness had been
cut with a knife, for that miracle is mostly a woman's privilege, but
there rose before me mental images that I could not control: a desert and
black Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap
of ancient ruins. Mathers explained that I had seen a being of the order
of Salamanders because he had shown me their symbol, but it was not
necessary even to show the symbol,