But can
you forgive me, old friend?"

"Heartily, heartily! And the book is burned?"

"See;" and he produced a mutilated manuscript. Strange, the part
burned--reduced, indeed, to tinder--was the concluding part that related
to Haroun,--to Grayle: no vestige of that part was left; the earlier
portions were scorched and mutilated, though in some places still
decipherable; but as my eye hastily ran over those places, I saw only
mangled sentences of the experimental problems which the writer had so
minutely elaborated.

"Will you keep the manuscript as it is, and as long as you like?" said
Strahan.

"No, no; I will have nothing more to do with it. Consult some other
man of science. And so this is the old woman's whole story? No
accomplice,--none? No one else shared her curiosity and her task?"

"No. Oddly enough, though, she made much the same excuse for her pitiful
folly that the madman made for his terrible crime; she said, 'the Devil
put it into her head.' Of course he did, as he puts everything wrong
into any one's head. That does not mend the matter."

"How! did she, too, say she saw a Shadow and heard a voice?"

"No; not such a liar as that, and not mad enough for such a lie. But
she said that when she was in bed, thinking over the book, something
irresistible urged her to get up and go down into the study; swore she
felt something lead her by the hand; swore, too, that when she first
discovered the manuscript was not in English, something whispered in her
ear to turn over the leaves and approach them to the candle. But I had
no patience to listen to all this rubbish. I sent her out of the
house, bag and baggage. But, alas! is this to be the end of all my wise
cousin's grand discoveries?"

True, of labours that aspired to bring into the chart of science new
worlds, of which even the traditionary rumour was but a voice from the
land of fable--nought left but broken vestiges of a daring footstep! The
hope of a name imperishable amidst the loftiest hierarchy of Nature's
secret temple, with all the pomp of recorded experiment, that applied to
the mysteries of Egypt and Chaldwa the inductions of Bacon, the tests
of Liebig--was there nothing left of this but what, here and there,
some puzzled student might extract, garbled, mutilated, perhaps
unintelligible, from shreds of sentences, wrecks of problems! O mind of
man, can the works, on which thou wouldst found immortality below, be
annulled into smoke and tinder b