sed
to take every opportunity of stealing into the laboratory, watching
intently all the curious proceedings that went on there, learning
the names and properties of the various ingredients, the gases, the
minerals, the salts, the essences; and although, as may be imagined,
science took, in these narrow regions, none of her loftiest flights,
they were to me the most marvellous and high-soaring efforts of human
intelligence. I was just at that period of life--the first opening of
adolescence--when fiction and adventure have the strongest bold upon our
nature, my mind filled with the marvels of Eastern romance, and imbued
with a sentiment, strong as any conviction, that I was destined to a
remarkable life. I passed days in dreamland,--what I should do in this
or that emergency; how rescue myself from such a peril; how profit by
such a stroke of fortune; by what arts resist the machinations of this
adversary; how conciliate the kind favor of that. In the wonderful tales
that I read, frequent mention was made of alchemy and its marvels;
now the search was for some secret of endless wealth; now, it was for
undying youth or undecay-ing beauty; while in other stories I read of
men who had learned how to read the thoughts, trace the motives, and
ultimately sway the hearts of their fellow-men, till life became to them
a mere field for the exercise of their every will and caprice, throwing
happiness and misery about them as the humor inclined. The strange life
of the laboratory fitted itself exactly to this phase of my mind.

The wonders it displayed, the endless combinations and transformations
it effected, were as marvellous as any that imaginative fiction could
devise; but even these were nothing compared to the mysterious influence
of the place itself upon my nervous system, particularly when I found
myself there alone. In the tales with which my head was filled, many
of them the wild fancies of Grimm, Hoffman, or Musaeus, nothing was more
common than to read how some eager student of the black art, deep in the
mystery of forbidden knowledge, had, by some chance combination, by some
mere accidental admixture of this ingredient with that, suddenly arrived
at the great secret, that terrible mystery which for centuries and
centuries had evaded human search. How often have I watched the fluid as
it boiled and bubbled in the retort, till I thought the air globules,
as they came to the surface, observed a certain rhythm and order. W