"It was whispered, and more than whispered--I had it from my father--that he raised the devil here, Messer Blondel; the very same that at Louvain strangled one of Agrippa's scholars who broke in on him before he could sink through the floor." Basterga's face took on an expression of supreme scorn.

"Idle tales!" he said.

"Fit only for women! Surely you do not believe them, Messer Blondel ?" "I ?" "Yes, you, Messer Syndic." "But this, at any rate, you'll not deny," Blondel retorted eagerly, "that he discovered the Philosopher's Stone ?" "And lived poor, and died no richer ?" Basterga rejoined in a tone of increasing scorn.
"Well, for the matter of that," the Syndic answered more slowly, "that may be explained." "How ?" "They say, and you must have heard it, that the gold he made in that way turned in three days to egg-shells and parings of horn." "Yet having it three days," Basterga asked with a sneer, "might he not buy all he wanted ?" "Well, I can only say that my father, who saw him more than once in the street, always told me--and I do not know any one who should have known better----" "Pshaw, Messer Blondel, you amaze me!" the scholar struck in, rising from his seat and adopting a tone at once contemptuous and dictatorial.
"Do you not know," he continued, "that the Philosopher's Stone was and is but a figure of speech, which stands as some say for the perfect element in nature, or as others say for the vital principle--that vivifying power which evades and ever must evade the search of men?
Do you not know that the sages whose speculations took that direction were endangered by accusations of witchcraft; and that it was to evade these and to give their researches such an aspect as would command the confidence of the vulgar, that they gave out that they were seeking either the Philosopher's Stone, which would make all men rich, or the Elixir Vitae, which would confer immortality.

Believe me, they were themselves no slaves to these expressions; nor were the initiated among their followers.

But as time went on, tyros, tempted by sounds, and caught by theories of transmutation, began to interpret them literally, and, straying aside, spent their lives in the vain pursuit of wealth or youth.