t
might interest and amuse Lilian, to open a drawer in which I kept the
manuscript of my cherished Physiological Work, and, in so doing, my eye
fell upon the wand which I had taken from Margrave. I had thrown it into
that drawer on my return home, after restoring Lilian to her mother's
house, and, in the anxiety which had subsequently preyed upon my mind,
had almost forgotten the strange possession I had as strangely acquired.
There it now lay, the instrument of agencies over the mechanism of
nature which no doctrine admitted by my philosophy could accept, side by
side with the presumptuous work which had analyzed the springs by which
Nature is moved, and decided the principles by which reason metes out,
from the inch of its knowledge, the plan of the Infinite Unknown.

I took up the wand and examined it curiously. It was evidently the work
of an age far remote from our own, scored over with half-obliterated
characters in some Eastern tongue, perhaps no longer extant. I found
that it was hollow within. A more accurate observation showed, in
the centre of this hollow, an exceedingly fine thread-like wire, the
unattached end of which would slightly touch the palm when the wand was
taken into the hand. Was it possible that there might be a natural and
even a simple cause for the effects which this instrument produced?
Could it serve to collect, from that great focus of animal heat and
nervous energy which is placed in the palm of the human hand, some such
latent fluid as that which Reichenbach calls the "odic," and which,
according to him, "rushes through and pervades universal Nature"? After
all, why not? For how many centuries lay unknown all the virtues of
the loadstone and the amber? It is but as yesterday that the forces of
vapour have become to men genii more powerful than those conjured up by
Aladdin; that light, at a touch, springs forth from invisible air; that
thought finds a messenger swifter than the wings of the fabled Afrite.
As, thus musing, my hand closed over the wand, I felt a wild thrill
through my frame. I recoiled; I was alarmed lest (according to the plain
common-sense theory of Julius Faber) I might be preparing my imagination
to form and to credit its own illusions. Hastily I laid down the wand.
But then it occurred to me that whatever its properties, it had so
served the purposes of the dread Fascinator from whom it had been
taken, that he might probably seek to repossess himself of it; he might
co