Thus saying, he took a small silver key from his pocket, and opened a Venetian cabinet, that stood near. "See here!" he said, producing a small gilded phial, containing, apparently, a quantity of a perfectly limpid fluid; "see here! the water that Adam found in the first fountain he met in Eden was not more clear than this; and yet the fruit of the tree that stood near it was not more certain death. No odour is to be discerned therein: to the eye it has no colour; to the lip no taste; and yet, like many another thing, with all this seeming simplicity, it is the most potent of all things, having power unlimited over life and death. Three drops of this, in the simplest beverage, will ensure that slow and gradual decay, which, at the end of a year, shall leave him who drinks it a clod in his mother earth. A larger dose will shorten the time by one half; and a larger still will reduce the time to a few weeks or days. The only difficulty is how to give it: but that I will find means for when I know the person." "It will not do!" replied Beatrice; "it will not do! it is not quick enough. Have you no other means?" "Many, lady! many!" replied the perfumer, smiling; "but, in good sooth, you are as impatient as a young lover. All our art has been tasked to render the means at once slow and secure, so as, in cases of necessity, to effect our deliverance from enemies without calling suspicion on ourselves. See here! this artificial rose, so like the natural flower, that the eye must be keen, indeed, which, at the distance of half a yard, could detect the difference. The scent, too, is the same----" "But why do you keep it under that glass ball?" demanded Beatrice, interrupting the long description with which he was proceeding. "Because, lady," replied the Italian, "that rose, placed in as fair a bosom as your own, and worn there for one half-hour, would lose its scent, and the wearer health and life within a week. Its odour, therefore, is too valuable to trust to the common air." "And those gloves?" asked Beatrice; "those gloves, so beautifully embroidered, for what purpose are they designed?" "Heaven forbid that I should see them on your hands!" replied Armandi; "though I have heard that they were once worn by a queen--who is since dead. But you spoke of quicker means. Here is this small box of powder, containing a certain salt that, in the twinkling of an eye, extinguishes the fire of the heart, and the light of the mind, and leaves nothing but the ashes behind. We often use it, diluted with other things, for other purposes; but I would not administer one dose of that, to any one of note, for a less sum than ten thousand golden Henrys, though the whole box is scarcely worth a hundred crowns. But so quick is its effect, and so marked the traces that it leaves behind, that the chirurgeon were a fool who did not at once pronounce the cause of death in him who took it."