ers. In her,
imagination was all pure and all potent; and tell me, O practical
reasoner, if reason has ever advanced one step into knowledge except
through that imaginative faculty which is strongest in the wisdom of
ignorance, and weakest in the ignorance of the wise. Ponder this, and
those marvels that perplex you will cease to be marvellous. I pass on
to the riddle that puzzles you most. By Philip Derval's account I am,
in truth, Louis Grayle restored to youth by the elixir, and while yet
infirm, decrepit, murdered Haroun,--a man of a frame as athletic as
yours! By accepting this notion you seem to yourself alone to unravel
the mysteries you ascribe to my life and my powers. O wise philosopher!
O profound logician! you accept that notion, yet hold my belief in the
Dervish's tale a chimera! I am Grayle made young by the elixir, and yet
the elixir itself is a fable!"

He paused and laughed, but the laugh was no longer even an echo of
its former merriment or playfulness,--a sinister and terrible laugh,
mocking, threatening, malignant.

Again he swept his hand over his brow, and resumed,--

"Is it not easier to so accomplished a sage as you to believe that the
idlers of Paris have guessed the true solution of that problem, my
place on this earth? May I not be the love-son of Louis Grayle? And when
Haroun refused the elixir to him, or he found that his frame was too far
exhausted for even the elixir to repair organic lesions of structure in
the worn frame of old age, may he not have indulged the common illusion
of fathers, and soothed his death-pangs with the thought that he should
live again in his son? Haroun is found dead on his carpet--rumour said
strangled. What proof of the truth of that rumour? Might he not
have passed away in a fit? Will it lessen your perplexity if I state
recollections? They are vague,--they often perplex myself; but so far
from a wish to deceive you, my desire is to relate them so truthfully
that you may aid me to reduce them into more definite form."

His face now became very troubled, the tone of his voice very
irresolute,--the face and the voice of a man who is either
blundering his way through an intricate falsehood, or through obscure
reminiscences.

"This Louis Grayle! this Louis Grayle! I remember him well, as one
remembers a nightmare. Whenever I look back, before the illness of which
I will presently speak, the image of Louis Grayle returns to me. I see
myself with him in African