No doubt it was as the result of certain rare properties in this ice-cold liquid that I now experienced a rapid transformation from a state of mind and body that was the limit of feebleness to one of almost superhuman strength and capability. Even before the two priests had armed themselves with masses of warm soft towels to dry me I felt myself glowing with health and youth. My brain seemed to clear and expand in some unaccountable way; I could feel every artery and muscle in my body thrill in joyous unison; to move my limbs was sheer delight. I realised too that my normal height had been increased by some inches, evidently due to the recent painless racking that had caused me to awake prematurely. "This must be the Fountain of Rejuvenation of which d'Aragno spoke," thought I. "I wonder he has never tried a bathe himself in these waters!" I found an exuberant joy even as I stood thus being rubbed and dried by the priests in the new appearance of myself; I thought of the justice of Vergil's comparison of the glittering young Neoptolemus at the fall of Troy with a snake that has just sloughed his scurfy skin in the warm spring sunshine. I positively quivered with my new-found pride of life. I had cast aside all care and terror; and as to the reflection of having lost the world of my birth, what fresh worlds of adventure were there not ahead of me to conquer or to enjoy in return for the mean, squalid, ungrateful Earth that I had deserted for ever and ever! Had I now been on the Earth itself and not on the planet of Meleager, I felt no doubt but that in a month or so I should be competent to lead an army to victory, or to astonish the House of Commons with a speech whose memory would outlive a generation, or to write a poem or a novel that would last whilst the English tongue endured, or to paint a picture or to mould a statue that would cause Raphael and Michelangelo to turn in their graves with envy. As Plato once held that the sum of all human knowledge is innate in every man, so I knew at last that the old Greek's axiom was fundamentally correct, but that I alone possessed the hidden key to unlock that chamber of the human brain wherein this mental wealth lies safely stored. I was the Semi-divine; I was the Super-man; I was the new Napoleon alike of the arts of war and peace; I was the latter-day Euphorion, child of beauty, strength and culture.