ouse. I continued to draw outlines and sketches
of various alterations, tending to simplify and contract Sir Philip's
general design. Margrave soon joined us, and this time took his seat
patiently beside our table, watching me use ruler and compass with
unwonted attention.

"I wish I could draw," he said; "but I can do nothing useful."

"Rich men like you," said Strahan, peevishly, "can engage others,
and are better employed in rewarding good artists than in making bad
drawings themselves."

"Yes, I can employ others; and--Fenwick, when you have finished with
Strahan I will ask permission to employ you, though without reward; the
task I would impose will not take you a minute."

He then threw himself back in his chair, and seemed to fall into a doze.

The dressing-bell rang; Strahan put away the plans,--indeed, they were
now pretty well finished and decided on. Margrave woke up as our host
left the room to dress, and drawing me towards another table in the
room, placed before me one of his favourite mystic books, and, pointing
to an old woodcut, said,

"I will ask you to copy this for me; it pretends to be a facsimile of
Solomon's famous seal. I have a whimsical desire to have a copy of it.
You observe two triangles interlaced and inserted in a circle?--the
pentacle, in short. Yes, just so. You need not add the astrological
characters: they are the senseless superfluous accessories of the
dreamer who wrote the book. But the pentacle itself has an intelligible
meaning; it belongs to the only universal language, the language of
symbol, in which all races that think--around, and above, and below
us--can establish communion of thought. If in the external universe any
one constructive principle can be detected, it is the geometrical;
and in every part of the world in which magic pretends to a written
character, I find that its hieroglyphics are geometrical figures. Is
it not laughable that the most positive of all the sciences should thus
lend its angles and circles to the use of--what shall I call it?--the
ignorance?--ay, that is the word--the ignorance of dealers in magic?"

He took up the paper, on which I had hastily described the triangles and
the circle, and left the room, chanting the serpent-charmer's song.

(1) The following description of a stone at Corfu, celebrated as an
antidote to the venom of the serpent's bite, was given to me by an
eminent scholar and legal functionary in that island:--

DESCRIPTIO