with the alchymist
in what had once been a garden belonging to the mansion. There were
still the remains of terraces and balustrades, and here and there a
marble urn, or mutilated statue overturned, and buried among weeds and
flowers run wild. It was the favourite resort of the alchymist in his
hours of relaxation, where he would give full scope to his visionary
flights. His mind was tinctured with the Rosicrucian doctrines. He
believed in elementary beings; some favourable, others adverse to his
pursuits; and, in the exaltation of his fancy, had often imagined that
he held communion with them in his solitary walks, about the
whispering groves and echoing walls of this old garden.

When accompanied by Antonio, he would prolong these evening
recreations. Indeed, he sometimes did it out of consideration for his
disciple, for he feared lest his too close application, and his
incessant seclusion in the tower, should be injurious to his health.
He was delighted and surprised by this extraordinary zeal and
perseverance in so young a tyro, and looked upon him as destined to be
one of the great luminaries of the art. Lest the student should repine
at the time lost in these relaxations, the good alchymist would fill
them up with wholesome knowledge, in matters connected with their
pursuits; and would walk up and down the alleys with his disciple,
imparting oral instruction, like an ancient philosopher. In all his
visionary schemes, these breathed a spirit of lofty, though chimerical
philanthropy, that won the admiration of the scholar. Nothing sordid
nor sensual, nothing petty nor selfish, seemed to enter into his
views, in respect to the grand discoveries he was anticipating. On the
contrary, his imagination kindled with conceptions of widely
dispensated happiness. He looked forward to the time when he should be
able to go about the earth, relieving the indigent, comforting the
distressed; and, by his unlimited means, devising and executing plans
for the complete extirpation of poverty, and all its attendant
sufferings and crimes. Never were grander schemes for general good,
for the distribution of boundless wealth and universal competence,
devised than by this poor, indigent alchymist in his ruined tower.

Antonio would attend these peripatetic lectures with all the ardour of
a devotee; but there was another circumstance which may have given a
secret charm to them. The garden was the resort also of Inez, where
she took her