"Certainly!" replied Leuwenhock, assuming a still more solemn tone--"certainly! I have discovered that the physical principle, which now animates the agreeable body of my very worthy friend, Mr. Peregrine Tyss, existed long ago, although only as a thought or consciousness of a shape. Look here; consider attentively the red point in the centre of the table. That is not only yourself, but the point is the form, of which your physical principle once could not be conscious. As a sparkling carbuncle, you then lay in a deep mine of the earth; but stretched over you, on the green surface of the ground, slept the beautiful Gamaheh; and her form also passed away in unconsciousness. Strange lines and foreign constellations cross your life from the point of time when the thought first put on a form, and became Mr. Peregrine Tyss. You are in possession of a talisman without knowing it, and this talisman is that very red carbuncle; it may be that King Sekakis wore it as a precious jewel in his crown, or, perhaps, in some measure, was the carbuncle itself; enough,--you possess it now; but a certain event must take place if its slumbering power is to be awakened; and with this waking of the power of your talisman will be decided the fate of an unhappy creature, who hitherto has led a shadowy life between fear and changing hope.--Alas! it was only a shadowy life that the sweet Gamaheh could gain by the profoundest magic, as the operative talisman was stolen from us. You alone have killed her, you alone can breathe fresh life into her, when the carbuncle glows again in your breast." "And can you," interrupted Peregrine, "can you explain what that event is which is to awake the power of the talisman?" The microscopist stared with open eyes at Peregrine, like a person who is suddenly surprised into confusion, and who does not know what to say. The thoughts ran thus: "If I had but held my tongue about the talisman which the unlucky rascal carries within him, and which gives him so much power over us that we must all dance to his pipe!--and now I am to tell him the event on which depends the awaking the strength of his talisman! Shall I confess to him that I don't know myself, that all my art fails to loosen the knot in which the lines meet?--nay, that when I consider the planetary centre of the horoscope, I feel most piteously, and my own learned head seems to me no better than a painted block for periwigs? Far from me be any such confession that would lower me, and put arms into his hands against myself. I will fasten something upon the ideot who fancies himself so wise,--something that shall make his blood run cold, and take from him all farther inclination of teazing me."