The vital element which still binds your spiritual body to its far-away physical counterpart will soon be dissipated. Nature’s magnetic chain which heretofore has enabled you to return to the physical body will be broken. Physical death will have overtaken you. The element which enables you to manifest yourself to these children of earth no longer will be at your command. You will pass from their vision and their knowledge for time, and who knows but for eternity. In the realm of spiritual darkness you will be left to wander alone, and alone to expiate your crimes. As it has been here, so will it be there, for you and you alone to determine whether you will follow the path which leads onward and upward to infinite light, perfect happiness and eternal life; or backward and downward along the pathway of deepest darkness to disintegration, dissolution, individual extinction, and a resolution back into nature’s elements. Farewell. CHAPTER XIII. “_A maximis ad minima._” PHLOGISTON IS RESTORED. And now, an awful silence brooded in that fateful chamber. The Great Light had vanished. Darkness was there. And then, as swiftly as came sleep, so now the awakening of Bill Vanderhook and his wife. “Gee, I nearly slipped”--muttered the druggist “That infernal machine must have made me dizzy for a second.” “And here she goes,”--repeated Bill, wholly unconscious of his lapse. His hand is again upon the lever. His eyes are again riveted upon the private exhibit. But the voice of the gay Gnani is heard no more by man. He makes no more appeals. His freshness is departing forever. His etheric countenance is distorted by unspeakable anguish. Despair looks from his eyes. His delicate hands, unclasped, are fallen to his sides. His head is bowed upon his breast. The foolish wise man now faces himself on all sides. He sees the past, the present, the future,--sin, suffering, and impenetrable silence. “And here she goes,”-- Whirr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r. Whizz-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z. And go she did,--and so did the Illuminat of Illinois. Without so much as a farewell word to his Alter Ego, the gaseous and now ghastly gentleman was violently lifted from the perpendicular and suddenly bent in a curve corresponding to the arc of that electrical circle in which he revolved. He was shot like a ball from a cannon, in and out, up and down, and round and round the Vanderhook laboratory. He was projected with fearful speed along the fatal pathway of that deadly attraction.