. There might have been something to provoke
a smile, in the contrast between the mansion and its inhabitants;
between present poverty and the graces of departed grandeur; but the
fancy of the student had thrown so much romance about the edifice and
its inmates, that every thing was clothed with charms. The
philosopher, with his broken-down pride, and his strange pursuits,
seemed to comport with the melancholy ruin he inhabited; and there was
a native elegance of spirit about the daughter, that showed she would
have graced the mansion in its happier days.

What delicious moments were these to the student! Inez was no longer
coy and reserved. She was naturally artless and confiding; though the
kind of persecution she had experienced from one admirer had rendered
her, for a time, suspicious and circumspect toward the other. She now
felt an entire confidence in the sincerity and worth of Antonio,
mingled with an overflowing gratitude. When her eyes met his, they
beamed with sympathy and kindness; and Antonio, no longer haunted by
the idea of a favoured rival, once more aspired to success.

At these domestic meetings, however, he had little opportunity of
paying his court, except by looks. The alchymist, supposing him, like
himself, absorbed in the study of alchymy, endeavoured to cheer the
tediousness of his recovery by long conversations on the art. He even
brought several of his half-burnt volumes, which the student had once
rescued from the flames, and rewarded him for their preservation, by
reading copious passages. He would entertain him with the great and
good acts of Flamel, which he effected through means of the
philosopher's stone, relieving widows and orphans, founding hospitals,
building churches, and what not; or with the interrogatories of King
Kalid, and the answers of Morienus, the Roman hermit of Jerusalem; or
the profound questions which Elardus, a necromancer of the province of
Catalonia, put to the devil, touching the secrets of alchymy, and the
devil's replies.

All these were couched, in occult language, almost unintelligible to
the unpractised ear of the disciple. Indeed, the old man delighted in
the mystic phrases and symbolical jargon in which the writers that
have treated of alchymy have wrapped their communications; rendering
them incomprehensible except to the initiated. With what rapture would
he elevate his voice at a triumphant passage, announcing the grand
discovery! "Thou shalt see," woul