d waste upon others what prolongs
and recruits his own being? Therefore, though he sold me his secret, he
would not sell me his treasure."

"Any quack may sell you the information how to make not only an elixir,
but a sun and a moon, and then scare you from the experiment by tales
of the danger of trying it! How do you know that this essence which the
Dervish possessed was the elixir of life, since, it seems, you have not
tried on yourself what effect its precious drops could produce? Poor
wretch, who once seemed to me so awfully potent! do you come to the
Antipodes in search of a drug that only exists in the fables by which a
child is amused?"

"The elixir of life is no fable," cried Margrave, with a kindling of
eye, a power of voice, a dilatation of form, that startled me in one
just before so feeble. "That elixir was bright in my veins when we last
met. From that golden draught of the life-spring of joy I took all that
can gladden creation. What sage would not have exchanged his wearisome
knowledge for my lusty revels with Nature? What monarch would not have
bartered his crown, with its brain-ache of care, for the radiance that
circled my brows, flashing out from the light that was in me? Oh again,
oh again! to enjoy the freedom of air with the bird, and the glow of the
sun with the lizard; to sport through the blooms of the earth, Nature's
playmate and darling; to face, in the forest and desert, the pard and
the lion,--Nature's bravest and fiercest,--her firstborn, the heir of
her realm, with the rest of her children for slaves!"

As these words burst from his lips, there was a wild grandeur in the
aspect of this enigmatical being which I had never beheld in the former
time of his affluent, dazzling youth. And, indeed, in his language, and
in the thoughts it clothed, there was an earnestness, a concentration, a
directness, a purpose, which had seemed wanting to his desultory talk
in the earlier days I expected that reaction of languor and exhaustion
would follow his vehement outbreak of passion, but, after a short pause,
he went on with steady accents. His will was sustaining his strength. He
was determined to force his convictions on me, and the vitality, once so
rich, rallied all its lingering forces to the aid of its intense desire.

"I tell you, then," he resumed, with deliberate calmness, "that, years
ago, I tested in my own person that essence which is the sovereign
medicament. In me, as you saw me at L----