“Why, this is as strange a maze as ever man trod,” cried Makepeace. “You tell me that your master died a hundred and forty years ago, and that you, Galiani, were with him at the time.” “Not Galiani, but Commagenus,” said the stranger in complacent amusement at the doctor’s bewilderment: “that was my name then. I was a youth, twenty years old, when I first came to Constantinople from the country which gave me my name--three years before the siege. There I became the favourite pupil of the great student of natural and medical science, Theodorus Gazophylacius.” “Why, that makes you a hundred and seventy years old,” feebly remonstrated Makepeace. “Are you then the Wandering Jew?” “Doctor, I am shocked,” said Commagenus. “Are such fables the stuff of which the _Speculum_ is made? I tell you there is nothing in this world that is not natural. That was my master’s constant teaching: also that to know and to will makes man master of nature. That much I learnt from him while he taught at Constantinople, and it was in my noviciate that I gathered from him the art to work such simple cures as you saw this afternoon. To prolong mere existence by keeping disease at bay--that he esteemed a vulgar art. To live long and die old, feeble and foolish--what gain is that to the man or his fellow-men? To live always, always to be young, always eager, always to be growing in wisdom and power--that was the secret for which he spent a lifetime’s search, and with his dying breath he told me that he had sought it in vain. Death, the last disease, is incurable: there is a stronger will than man’s. But he told me of a door of escape. In his last moments he was possessed with a dread that his discovery would perish in the general eclipse of learning which he foresaw as the result of the disappearance of the Byzantine schools, and, with solemn admonition as to its use, he imparted it to me. Death, the mere accident of the flesh, is transferable with the flesh. With will and knowledge, the spirit--all that you call character, intelligence, consciousness, memory--may pass from form to form, unchanged in the transition and always capable of growth and ripening. Alas, that I have not made better use of my master’s prescriptions! But it has been my evil fate. Another might do better.” “These are heathen imaginings--snares and delusions of Satan,” cried Makepeace. “What talk is this of tampering with the divine in us? Man, are you a Christian?”