pages: latestmagicbeing00hoff.pdf, 149
This data as json
path | page | folder | text |
---|---|---|---|
latestmagicbeing00hoff.pdf | 149 | THE STORY OF THE ALKAHEST 133 ing ladies something to put in their husbands' tea. History doesn't say what. Let us hope it was only sugar. Well, this old gentleman managed to get hold of the recipe for making the Alkahest. Whether he found it out himself, or whether he cribbed it from the cookery-book of some other alchemist, I can't say. Anyhow, he got it; and he made up some of the stuff and put it in that bottle. "When he was just going to be burnt as a wiz- ard, which was the regular thing with scientific men in those days, he handed the bottle to his eld- est son, my great-great-grandfather seventeen times removed, saying, "Take it, my son, and may it do you more good than it has done me.' "My great-great-grandfather took the bottle; but he had no idea what it contained. He was just going to ask his father what the letters on it meant, but just at that moment the old gentleman flared up, and it was too late. For the rest of his life my great-great-grandfather puzzled his head as to what those two letters H R stood for, but all he could think of was "horse-radish,' and he knew it couldn't be that. "Since that the bottle has been handed down in our family for sixteen generations, till at last it came to the hands of my Uncle James, and he puz- zled over those letters like the rest. Uncle James was a bit of a "nut,' and prided himself on his fine head of hair, but in course of time he found he was |