Annoyances, revelations, and delusions of persecution now crowded in upon him. Strange dreams foretold the future, commonplace objects assumed fantastic shape. One day, when looking at the embryo of a sprouting walnut under the microscope, he saw two little white hands folded as if in prayer. Immovable, perfect in form, they were there, the hands of a child or a woman, raised beseechingly towards him. Shortly before the incident he had sinned grievously against his child. Seized by an uncontrollable longing to be reunited to his wife, in spite of the divorce proceedings, he had wished--with a concentrated and occultly sharpened desire--that the child might fall ill, and thus become a link of reunion. There were other mysteries. The coal in his stove burned itself into grotesque shapes, works of some kind of elemental sculptor, which were so realistic that the sparrows, feeding on crumbs by his window, were frightened by the sight of them. His pillow-case, crumpled by the after-dinner nap, showed him one day a head in marble modelled on the lines of Michel-Angelo; another day a mighty Zeus rested on his bed; one night, after a festive evening with friends, he was received by the devil himself in correct middle-age attire, thus competing with Blake who one day, whilst ascending the stairs of his house, saw Satan glaring at him through a window. From sulphur he turned to iodine as a subject of original experimentation, and then, oblivious of Aristotle's injunctions, to the goldmaker's art. He did not possess "the most precious stone of the philosophers," by which base metals are changed into gold, and he had to be unorthodox--even when practising the alchemistic art. He therefore rejected the alchemical faith that gold alone is free from sulphur, and commenced experiments with solutions of sulphate of iron in support of the theory that gold contains iron and sulphur. He succeeded in making gold--his special gold of art--but it vanished when put to the ordinary chemical test. Signs and guidance from unseen Powers encouraged him to persist in spite of failure. Whilst out for a walk his eyes were riveted by the letters F and S intertwined. At first he thought of his wife's initials, and of her faithful love, but such a commonplace interpretation was quickly dismissed. The letters meant _Fer_ and _Soufre_--the secret of the generation of gold was thus laid bare before his eyes. Another time two pieces of paper lying at the foot of a monument attracted his attention. One bore the imprint 207, the other 28. What could this be but a reminder of the atomic weights of lead (207) and silicum (28)? Subsequent experiments in which he extracted gold from lead and silicum confirmed the wisdom of the exegesis made. But the spirit of gold is fickle. One day, after repeated failures, when standing naked to the waist as a smith before the fiercely burning furnace, he looked into the crucible, and saw a skull with a pair of glittering eyes.