or demons dismayed
and baffled us.' Such, then, is the danger which seems so appalling to
a son of the East, as it seemed to a sees in the dark age of Europe. But
we can deride all its threats, you and I. For myself, I own frankly I
take all the safety that the charms and resources of magic bestow. You,
for your safety, have the cultured and disciplined reason which reduces
all fantasies to nervous impressions; and I rely on the courage of one
who has questioned, unquailing, the Luminous Shadow, and wrested from
the hand of the magician himself the wand which concentred the wonders
of will!"

To this strange and long discourse I listened without interruption, and
now quietly answered,--

"I do not merit the trust you affect in my courage; but I am now on my
guard against the cheats of the fancy, and the fumes of a vapour can
scarcely bewilder the brain in the open air of this mountain-land. I
believe in no races like those which you tell me lie viewless in space,
as do gases. I believe not in magic; I ask not its aids, and I dread not
its terrors. For the rest, I am confident of one mournful courage,--the
courage that comes from despair. I submit to your guidance, whatever it
be, as a sufferer whom colleges doom to the grave submits to the quack
who says, 'Take my specific and live!' My life is nought in itself; my
life lives in another. You and I are both brave from despair; you would
turn death from yourself, I would turn death from one I love more than
myself. Both know how little aid we can win from the colleges, and both,
therefore, turn to the promises most audaciously cheering. Dervish or
magician, alchemist or phantom, what care you and I? And if they fail
us, what then? They cannot fail us more than the colleges do!"

CHAPTER LXXXIII.

The gold has been gained with an easy labour. I knew where to seek for
it, whether under the turf or in the bed of the creek. But Margrave's
eyes, hungrily gazing round every spot from which the ore was disburied,
could not detect the substance of which he alone knew the outward
appearance. I had begun to believe that, even in the description given
to him of this material, he had been credulously duped, and that no such
material existed, when, coming back from the bed of the watercourse, I
saw a faint yellow gleam amidst the roots of a giant parasite plant, the
leaves and blossoms of which climbed up the sides of the cave with its
antediluvian relics. The gleam was the