harming esprit of the epithet. Besides the works I have
mentioned, there was an old, old Latin alchemy book, with the manuscript
annotations of some ancient Rosicrucian, in the pages of which I had
a vague notion that I might find the mighty secret of the Lapis
Philosophorum, otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green Lion, the
Quinta Essentia, the Soap of Sages, the Vinegar of Philosophers, the Dew
of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all
manner of odd aliases, as I am assured by the plethoric little book
before me, in parchment covers browned like a meerschaum with the smoke
of furnaces and the thumbing of dead gold seekers, and the fingering of
bony-handed book-misers, and the long intervals of dusty slumber on the
shelves of the bouquiniste; for next year it will be three centuries
old, and it had already seen nine generations of men when I caught its
eye (Alchemiae Doctrina) and recognized it at pistol-shot distance as a
prize, among the breviaries and Heures and trumpery volumes of the
old open-air dealer who exposed his treasures under the shadow of St.
Sulpice. I have never lost my taste for alchemy since I first got hold
of the Palladium Spagyricum of Peter John Faber, and sought--in vain,
it is true--through its pages for a clear, intelligible, and practical
statement of how I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights of
tall kitchen clock into good yellow gold, specific gravity 19.2, and
exchangeable for whatever I then wanted, and for many more things than
I was then aware of. One of the greatest pleasures of childhood found
in the mysteries which it hides from the skepticism of the elders, and
works up into small mythologies of its own. I have seen all this
played over again in adult life,--the same delightful bewilderment
semi-emotional belief in listening to the gaseous praises of this or
that fantastic system, that I found in the pleasing mirages conjured
up for me by the ragged old volume I used to pore over in the southeast
attic-chamber.

The rooms of the second story, the chambers of birth and death, are
sacred to silent memories.

Let us go down to the ground-floor. I should have begun with this, but
that the historical reminiscences of the old house have been recently
told in a most interesting memoir by a distinguished student of our
local history. I retain my doubts about those "dents" on the floor of
the right-hand room, "the study" of successive occupants, sai