f the giant serpent, than there
would be in the serpent itself, could hunger again move its coils, and
venom again arm its fangs."

I was silent, for I could not deny that that conviction had come to me.

"Henceforth, when you recover from the confusion or anger which
now disturbs your impressions, you will be prepared to listen to my
explanations and my recital in a spirit far different from that with
which you would have received them before you were subjected to the
experiment, which, allow me to remind you, you invited and defied. You
will now, I trust, be fitted to become my confidant and my assistant;
you will advise with me how, for the sake of humanity, we should act
together against the incarnate lie, the anomalous prodigy which glides
through the crowd in the image of joyous beauty. For the present I quit
you. I have an engagement, on worldly affairs, in the town this night.
I am staying at L----, which I shall leave for Derval Court tomorrow
evening. Come to me there the day after to-morrow, at any hour that may
suit you the best. Adieu!"

Here Sir Philip Derval rose and left the room. I made no effort to
detain him. My mind was too occupied in striving to recompose itself and
account for the phenomena that had scared it, and for the strength of
the impressions it still retained.

I sought to find natural and accountable causes for effects so abnormal.

Lord Bacon suggests that the ointments with which witches anointed
themselves might have had the effect of stopping the pores and
congesting the rain, and thus impressing the sleep of the unhappy dupes
of their own imagination with dreams so vivid that, on waking, they were
firmly convinced that they had been borne through the air to the Sabbat.

I remember also having heard a distinguished French traveller--whose
veracity was unquestionable--say, that he had witnessed extraordinary
effects produced on the sensorium by certain fumigations used by an
African pretender to magic. A person, of however healthy a brain;
subjected to the influence of these fumigations, was induced to believe
that he saw the most frightful apparitions.

However extraordinary such effects, they were not incredible,--not at
variance with our notions of the known laws of nature. And to the vapour
or the odours which a powder applied to a lamp had called forth, I was,
therefore, prepared to ascribe properties similar to those which Bacon's
conjecture ascribed to the witches' ointme