The young wife buried her face in her hands and answered: "No, no, life is too miserable and poverty-stricken at home and I have suffered too much in the long struggle to keep up appearances. And then what would people say? No, no,—I will do everything that I can to please you."

"Very well, you may stay," he replied gloomily.

Frau Schimmel, who had been in the room for some time, turned to the notary and said: "The Court apothecary used to say that I was stupid, but thirty years ago I foretold what has happened here today."

She then implored Zeno to throw the elixir into the Pleisse, but for the first time he exhibited a will of his own. He put the phial and the document in his father's writing into his breast pocket, and tucking the gray-haired notary under his arm, he left the room.

Frau Schimmel followed his example. Having reached the ground-floor she stopped and, shaking her gray head, murmured: "Doctor Melchior was such a wise man, I wonder he did not order that each of his successors should make the girl of his choice inhale the elixir before he proposed to her. The life I led with Vorkel, and with my second husband Schimmel, who lies beside the first in the churchyard, was hardly perfect, but Zeno's existence will be hell upon earth."

But this time Frau Schimmel was a little wide of the mark in her prophesy. The two young people, for a time, treated each other distantly and coldly, but Fran Rosalie learned to regard her husband with a timid respect that sat well upon her. As for him he was transformed into a stern man since he had inhaled the elixir, and his severe dress seemed but an outward sign of his earnestness. Before the year was out a boy was given to them, and when Rosalie saw him take the little one in his arms and kiss it, she called him to her bedside and whispered: "Forgive me."

He made a sign of pardon, and stooping, kissed her white face, that was still the dearest in the world to him. Then he went to his own room and inhaled the elixir whose properties and effect he had long before learned from Frau Schimmel. He called aloud, as if speaking to another person: "If she be good to the child, I will no longer make her feel how she hurt me, though I can never forget it."

But it was not granted to him to show by his actions that he had forgiven her, for during the night fever supervened, and before morning she died.

Her hot hand had lain in his, just before her heart ceased to beat, and had pressed it, as if in farewell.

Frau Schimmel followed her darling's unfortunate wife shortly afterwards. Her death was a peaceful and happy one, for Zeno held her withered hand, and talked to her of the days when she had dressed him in his beautiful light-blue frocks. He closed her eyes himself, and followed her coffin to the churchyard.

Only Herr Winckler remained to the widower, who lived alone with his son in The Three Kings, and like a father, more than a friend, aided him in his researches concerning the elixir.

They discovered that it produced its effect only on those who were connected with the Ueberhell family. This was a great disappointment to Zeno, for he set a high value upon truth, and had heard from his father's friend what great blessings for mankind the dead man had anticipated from his discovery. All his hopes of using it in his profession to make hardened sinners confess their misdeeds, were therefore, vain. For this purpose it was certainly useless and Zeno and Herr Winckler concluded that the reason why its effect was so limited was because it owed its power to the blood of a child of the Ueberhell race.

That its potency extended to those who married into the Ueberhell house was proved by its effect upon Frau Rosalie. As it had also once vanquished Frau Schimmel, they argued that the Court apothecary must have used other blood beside his own, for he certainly had never been connected with his housekeeper by marriage. What had been intended to benefit the whole world, exercised its influence only in one direction, and on the members of one small family; this grieved the old notary when he recalled the happy and triumphant death-bed of his friend.

The elixir had undoubtedly changed Melchior's son to an incredible extent; from an easily-led, pleasure-loving youth, Zeno became a self- contained man—almost a recluse—and he won for himself the reputation of being one of the severest judges on the Leipsic bench.

High and low doffed their hats to him with respect, but he was not popular.

After he had worked at the Rathhaus long after hours, he would go home alone, and no one sought him out to pass an hour in his company, for everyone feared the rough and brutal frankness of his speech. The gregarious and friendly notary used to wince when he heard his adopted son spoken of as "the hard Ueberhell," or "the sinner's scourge," and he tried his best to make him more human, and to draw him within his circle of friends.

When death overtook Herr Winckler, from whose mouth Zeno used to hear many bitter tirades against the elixir, and Melchior's son found himself entirely alone, and making always more enemies by his irrepressible instinct to speak out what he thought to be the truth, he would sometimes ask himself if it were not better to destroy the elixir, which had brought him nothing but misery, and thus to spare his son and succeeding generations.

But the stern upholder of the law did not feel that he had the right to disobey the instructions of his father. And so the elixir descended to his son, and was given to him on his twenty-fifth birthday by his guardian, for Zeno died before his only child reached that age.

What happened to this second Melchior Ueberhell whose unfortunate history…. Here the story broke off. The son of one of my friends had found it in an old chest, when he was playing in the attic of The Three Kings. It was written in a discoloured blank-book, which had escaped the devastations of the mice and insects, because it had lain under a pile of aromatic herbs and drugs that had probably belonged to the shop of the Court apothecary.

Between the last page and the cover of the blank-book, which was confided to me, I found a continuation by a later Ueberhell.

This appendix could hardly have been written earlier than towards the end of the last century, to judge by the paper, the stiff, old-fashioned handwriting and, more surely still, by the fact that the writer mentions vaccination as a new discovery. Inoculation was first tried in 1796, and three years later an institution was opened in London where a Leipsic professor of medicine gave lectures.

This communication is signed: "Doctor Ernst Ueberhell, Professor of Medicine." And runs as follows:

Several centuries have passed since the time of the ancestor to whom we owe the wonderful history of the elixir as written in this book, and preserved from generation to generation in our family.

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