We must be careful not to excite suspicion. Perhaps a
disguise might have been better, but I think this will do. There--they
add at least a decade to your age. If you could see yourself you
wouldn't speak to your reflection. You look as scholarly as a Chinese
mandarin. Remember, let me do the talking and do just as I do."

We had now entered the shop, stumbled up the dark stairs, and
presented Dr. Burnham's card with a word of explanation along the
lines which he had suggested. Prescott, surrounded by his retorts,
crucibles, burettes, and condensers, received us much more graciously
than I had had any reason to anticipate. He was a man in the late
forties, his face covered with a thick beard, and his eyes, which
seemed a little weak, were helped out with glasses almost as scholarly
as ours.

I could not help thinking that we three bespectacled figures lacked
only the flowing robes to be taken for a group of mediaeval alchemists
set down a few centuries out of our time in the murky light of
Prescott's sanctum. Yet, though he accepted us at our face value, and
began to talk of his strange discoveries there was none of the old
familiar prating about matrix and flux, elixir, magisterium, magnum
opus, the mastery and the quintessence, those alternate names for the
philosopher's stone which Paracelsus, Simon Forman, Jerome Cardan, and
the other mediaeval worthies indulged in. This experience at least was
as up-to-date as the Curies, Becquerel, Ramsay, and the rest.

"Transmutation," remarked Prescott, "was, as you know, finally
declared to be a scientific absurdity in the eighteenth century. But I
may say that it is no longer so regarded. I do not ask you to believe
anything until you have seen; all I ask is that you maintain the same
open mind which the most progressive scientists of to-day exhibit in
regard to the subject."

Kennedy had seated himself some distance from a curious piece or
rather collection of apparatus over which Prescott was working. It
consisted of numerous coils and tubes.

"It may seem strange to you, gentlemen," Prescott proceeded, "that a
man who is able to produce gold from, say, copper should be seeking
capital from other people. My best answer to that old objection is
that I am not seeking capital, as such. The situation with me is
simply this. Twice I have applied to the patent office for a patent
on my invention. They not only refuse to grant it, but they refuse to
consider the application