honey, as they say, and the only ones to use it all were the servants! Oh, there the servants grew fat and did well, while the master looked up to the skies and grew lean.”

And presently, to the sound of your driver’s jovial laugh the coach would bowl clear of the long grey walls, emerge from under the overhanging branches; and then the well-known stretch of superb scenery suddenly revealed at the xivbend of the road would perhaps so engross your attention that your transient traveller’s interest in the eccentric, world-forsaking master of Bindon-Cheveral would no doubt have evaporated.

xiv

But pray you who travel with me to-day give me longer patience. I have to tell the story of Bindon’s awakening.

BOOK I

Wordsworth

3

CHAPTER I FAIR, YOUNG, CAPABLE HANDS

FAIR, YOUNG, CAPABLE HANDS

Drayton

On that evening of the autumnal equinox Master Simon Rickart—the simpler or the student as he liked to call himself, the alchemist as many held him to be—alone, save for the company of his cat, in his laboratory at the foot of the keep, was luxuriating as usual in his work of research.

The black cat sat by the wood fire and watched the man.

As Master Simon moved to and fro, the topaz eyes followed him. When he spoke (which he constantly did to himself, under his voice and disjointedly, after the wont of some solitary old people) they became narrowed into slits of cunning intelligence. But when the observations were personally addressed to his Catship, Belphegor blinked in comfortable acknowledgment. “As wise as Master Simon himself,” the country folk vowed: and indeed, wherever the fame of the alchemist had spread through the country-side, so had that of the alchemist’s cat.

4There were two fires in the laboratory. One of timber, that roared and crackled its life away and sank into an ever increasing heap of fair white ash. In the vault-like room this fire burned year in year out on a hearth hewn many feet 

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