M. d’Asterac, who opened the door, stood quietly before us. His long black figure seemed to be enveloped in flaming air. He asked quietly on what pressing business we were looking for him at so late an hour. There was no conflagration but a terrible fire, burning in a big furnace with reflectors, which as I have since learned are called athanors. The whole of the rather large room was full of glass bottles with long necks twined round glass tubes of a duck-beak shape, retorts, resembling chubby cheeks out of which came noses like trumpets, crucibles, cupels, matrasses, cucurbits and vases of all forms. My dear old tutor wiping his face shining like live coals said: “Oh, sir, we were afraid that the castle was alight like straw. Thank God, the library is not burning. But are you practising the spagyric art, sir?” “I do not want to conceal from you,” said M. d’Asterac, “that I have made great progress in it, but withal I have not found the theorem capable of rendering my work perfect. At the moment you knocked at the door I was picking up the Spirit of the World, and the Flower of Heaven, which are the veritable Fountains of Youth. Have you some understanding of alchemy, Monsieur Coignard?” The abbé replied that he had got some notions of it from certain books, but that he considered the practice of it to be pernicious and contrary to religion. M. d’Asterac smiled and said: “You are too knowing a man, M. Coignard, not to be acquainted with the Flying Eagle, the Bird of Hermes, the Fowl of Hermogenes, the Head of a Raven, the Green Lion and the Phoenix.” “I have been told,” said my good master, “that by these names are distinguished the philosopher’s stone in its different states. But I have doubts about the possibility of a transmutation of metals.” With the greatest confidence M. d’Asterac replied: “Nothing is easier, my dear sir, than to bring your uncertainty to an end.” He opened an old rickety chest standing in the wall and took out of it a copper coin, bearing the effigy of the late king, and called our attention to a round stain crossing the coin from side to side. “That,” he said, “is the effect of the stone, which has transmuted the copper into silver, but that’s only a trifle.” He went back to the chest and took out of it a sapphire the size of an egg, an opal of marvellous dimensions and a handful of perfect fine emeralds. “Here are some of my doings,” he said, “which are proof enough that the spagyric art is not the dream of an empty brain.” At the bottom of the small wooden bowl lay five or six little diamonds, of which M. d’Asterac made no mention. My tutor asked him if they also were of his make, and, the alchemist having acknowledged it: