H. G. Wells[163] uses this theme combined with the transfer of personality. An aged man bargains with a youth to make him his heir on certain conditions. The purpose, unknown to the young fellow, is to rob him of his youth to reanimate the old man. A magic drink transfers the personality of the octogenarian to the body of youth and leaves the young man's soul cabined in the worn-out frame. But the drug is more powerful than Mr. Elvesham supposed, for it brings death to both who drink it and the bargain has a ghastly climax. Barry Pain has a somewhat similar situation of the tragic miscalculation, in _The Wrong Elixir_, the story of an alchemist who brews the life-giving potion but means to keep it all to himself. On a certain night he will drink it and become immortally young, in a world of dying men. While he waits, a gypsy girl asks him to give her a poison to kill a man she hates. He prepares the potion for her and sets it aside. He drinks at the time he planned, but instead of eternal life, the draught brings him swift-footed death. Does he drink the wrong elixir, or have all his calculations been wrong? [163] In _The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham_. An example of the way in which the magic of the old fiction of supernaturalism has been transferred into the scientific in modern times, is seen in _The Elixir of Youth_, by Albert Bigelow Paine. A man in an upper room alone is wishing that he had the gift of immortal youth, when a stranger in black enters and answers his thought. He tells him that to read the mind is not black magic, but science; that he is not a magician, but a scientist, and as such he has compounded the elixir of youth, which he will give to him. This drug will enable a man to halt his age at any year he chooses and to make it permanent, as Peter Ibbetson and the Duchess of Towers did in their dream-life. The stranger leaves the flask with the man and goes away. But the one who wished for immortal life decides that after all God must know best, and, though his decision not to drink has not crystalized, he is not greatly sorry when the flask is shattered and the liquid spilled. This is symbolic of the real wisdom of life. The frequent use of the theme of the elixir of life, of deathless youth, illustrates how humanity clutches at youth with pathos and shrinks from age. Red Ranrahan, the loved singer of Ireland, whom W. B. Yeats creates for us with unforgettable words, makes a curse against old age when he feels it creeping on him.