, you beheld the proof of its
virtues. Feeble and ill as I am now, my state was incalculably more
hopeless when formerly restored by the elixir. He from whom I then
took the sublime restorative died without revealing the secret of its
composition. What I obtained was only just sufficient to recruit the
lamp of my life, then dying down--and no drop was left for renewing the
light which wastes its own rays in the air that it gilds. Though the
Dervish would not sell me his treasure, he permitted me to see it.
The appearance and odour of this essence are strangely
peculiar,--unmistakable by one who has once beheld and partaken of
it. In short, I recognized in the hands of the Dervish the bright
life-renewer, as I had borne it away from the corpse of the Sage of
Aleppo."

"Hold! Are you then, in truth, the murderer of Haroun, and is your true
name Louis Grayle?"

"I am no murderer, and Louis Grayle did not leave me his name. I again
adjure you to postpone, for this night at least, the questions you wish
to address to me.

"Seeing that this obstinate pauper possessed that for which the pale
owners of millions, at the first touch of palsy or gout, would consent
to be paupers, of course I coveted the possession of the essence even
more than the knowledge of the substance from which it is extracted. I
had no coward fear of the experiment, which this timid driveller had not
the nerve to renew. But still the experiment might fail. I must traverse
land and sea to find the fit place for it, while, in the rags of the
Dervish, the unfailing result of the experiment was at hand. The Dervish
suspected my design, he dreaded my power. He fled on the very night
in which I had meant to seize what he refused to sell me. After all, I
should have done him no great wrong; for I should have left him wealth
enough to transport himself to any soil in which the material for the
elixir may be most abundant; and the desire of life would have given
his shrinking nerves the courage to replenish its ravished store. I
had Arabs in my pay, who obeyed me as hounds their master. I chased the
fugitive. I came on his track, reached a house in a miserable village,
in which, I was told, he had entered but an hour before. The day was
declining, the light in the room imperfect. I saw in a corner what
seemed to me the form of the Dervish,--stooped to seize it, and my hand
closed on an asp. The artful Dervish had so piled his rags that they
took the shape of th