The period of their residence abroad was a chequered one, and many and extraordinary were their adventures and experiences, alternating between honour and discredit—between luxury and distress. For many months they were hospitably entertained by Count Lasque while engaged in their researches for the Philosopher’s Stone, but finding that they spent more gold than they were able to produce he got tired, and persuaded them to pay a visit to Rudolph, King of Bohemia, who, though a weak and credulous man, soon became conscious of the imposture that was being practised, and passed them on to Stephen, King of Poland, at Cracow, but he declined to have anything to do with them, and the Emperor Rudolph refused to pay their expenses, or further encourage their experiments, though he permitted them to reside at Prague, and occasionally to appear at Court, until they were banished from the country at the instigation of the Pope’s Nuncio, who stigmatised them as “notorious magicians.” Dee lamented the “subtill devises and plotts” laid against him, and pathetically added, “God best knoweth how I was very ungodly dealt withall, when I meant all truth, sincerity, fidelity, and piety towardes God, and my Queene, and country.” The old man had surrendered himself entirely to Kelly. Under his iniquitous influence he degenerated into a mere necromancer, and was sinking more and more into discredit. On leaving Bohemia the two adventurers found an asylum in the Castle of Trebona, whither the Count of Rosenberg had invited them, and where, for a time, they were maintained in great affluence, owing, as they affirmed, to their discovery of the secret of transmuting the baser metals into gold. Kelly would seem to have learned some secrets from the German chemists which he did not reveal to his employer, but by their possession contrived to increase his influence over him, while he himself had recourse to the worst species of the magic art for the purposes of avarice and fraud. It was while at Trebona that Kelly produced the wonderful elixir, or Philosopher’s Stone, in the form of a powder, which Lilly, in his “Memoirs,” says he obtained from a friar who came to Dee’s door. With this “powder of projection,” or “salt of metals,” as it was variously called, they were enabled to coat the baser metals with silver or gold, and would seem to have hit upon the process which, a century and a half later, Joseph Hancock introduced into Sheffield—that of electro-plating. Among other transmutations they converted a piece of an old iron warming pan, by warming it at the fire, into (or covered it with) silver, and sent it to Queen Elizabeth.[24] Why, when they were about it, they did not “transmute” the whole pan is not stated, but it would seem they were not able to work the discovery easily or quickly enough to make it pay, for heart-burnings, jealousies, and disputations arose, and quarrels became of frequent occurrence. At one time Kelly got such a hold upon his dupe