ear.

"Vain pretender, do not boast that you brought a genius for epigram to
the service of science. Science is lenient to all who offer experiment
as the test of conjecture. You are of the stuff of which inquisitors are
made. You cry that truth is profaned when your dogmas are questioned.
In your shallow presumption you have meted the dominions of nature, and
where your eye halts its vision, you say, 'There nature must close;'
in the bigotry which adds crime to presumption, you would stone the
discoverer who, in annexing new realms to her chart, unsettles your
arbitrary landmarks. Verily, retribution shall await you! In those
spaces which your sight has disdained to explore you shall yourself be
a lost and bewildered straggler. Hist! I see them already! The gibbering
phantoms are gathering round you!"

The man's voice stopped abruptly; his eye fixed in a glazing stare;
his hand relaxed its hold; he fell back on his pillow. I stole from the
room; on the landing-place I met the nurse and the old woman-servant.
Happily the children were not there. But I heard the wail of the female
child from some room not far distant.

I whispered hurriedly to the nurse, "All is over!" passed again under
the jaws of the vast anaconda, and on through the blind lane between the
dead walls, on through the ghastly streets, under the ghastly moon, went
back to my solitary home.

CHAPTER III.

It was some time before I could shake off the impression made on me by
the words and the look of that dying man.

It was not that my conscience upbraided me. What had I done? Denounced
that which I held, in common with most men of sense in or out of my
profession, to be one of those illusions by which quackery draws profit
from the wonder of ignorance. Was I to blame if I refused to treat
with the grave respect due to asserted discovery in legitimate science
pretensions to powers akin to the fables of wizards? Was I to descend
from the Academe of decorous science to examine whether a slumbering
sibyl could read from a book placed at her back, or tell me at L----
what at that moment was being done by my friend at the Antipodes?

And what though Dr. Lloyd himself might be a worthy and honest man, and
a sincere believer in the extravagances for which he demanded an equal
credulity in others, do not honest men every day incur the penalty
of ridicule if, from a defect of good sense, they make themselves
ridiculous? Could I have foreseen that a s