Her comb stood up, and she
began again to lay eggs.'
Arthur laughed heartily.
'I confess I like that story much better than the others. The _Primum Ens
Melissae_ at least offers a less puerile benefit than most magical
secrets.'
'Do you call the search for gold puerile?' asked Haddo, who had been
sitting for a long time in complete silence.
'I venture to call it sordid.'
'You are very superior.'
'Because I think the aims of mystical persons invariably gross or
trivial? To my plain mind, it is inane to raise the dead in order to hear
from their phantom lips nothing but commonplaces. And I really cannot see
that the alchemist who spent his life in the attempted manufacture of
gold was a more respectable object than the outside jobber of modern
civilization.'
'But if he sought for gold it was for the power it gave him, and it was
power he aimed at when he brooded night and day over dim secrets. Power
was the subject of all his dreams, but not a paltry, limited dominion
over this or that; power over the whole world, power over all created
things, power over the very elements, power over God Himself.
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