"Most honoured friend, and, as fortune soon will have it, most happy friend,--you know that my people are of a reckless, merry disposition, and one might say that they consisted of mere youthful springalds. With this I can, for my part, boast of a peculiar sort of wisdom, which in general is wanting to you children of men;--that is, I never do any thing out of season. To bite is the principal business of my life, but I always bite in the right time and right place; lay that to your heart, my worthy friend.
"I will now back from your hands, and faithfully preserve the gift, intended for you, and which neither that preparation of a man, called Swammerdamm, nor Leuwenhock, who wears himself out with petty envy, could possess. And now, my honoured Mr. Tyss, resign yourself to slumber. You will soon fall into a dreamy delirium, in which the great moment will reveal itself. At the right time I shall be with you again."
Master Flea disappeared, and the brilliance, which he had spread, faded away in the darkness of the chamber, the curtains of which were closely drawn.
It fell out as Master Flea had said.
Peregrine fancied that he was lying on the banks of a murmuring wood-stream, and heard the sighing of the wind, the whispering of the leaves, and the humming of a thousand insects that buzzed about him. Then it seemed as if strange voices were audible, plainer and still plainer, so that, at last, Peregrine thought he could make out words. But it was only a confused and stunning hubbub that reached his ear.
At length these words were pronounced by a solemn, hollow voice, that sounded clearer and clearer,--
"Unhappy king, Sekakis, thou who didst despise the intelligence of nature, who, blinded by the evil spells of a crafty demon, didst look upon the false Teraphim, instead of the real spirit!
"In that fate-fraught spot at Famagusta, buried in the deep mine of the earth, lay the talisman; but, when you destroyed yourself, there was no principle to rekindle its frozen powers. In vain you sacrificed your daughter, the beautiful Gamaheh; in vain was the amorous despair of the Thistle, Zeherit; but at the same time impotent and inoperative was the blood-thirst of the Leech-Prince. Even the awkward Genius, Thetel, was obliged to let go his sweet prey, for so mighty still, O king, Sekakis, was thy half-extinct idea, that thou couldst return the lost one to the primal element, from which she sprang.
"And ye, insane anatomists of nature, that ever the unhappy one should have fallen into your hands, when you discovered her in the petal of a tulip! That you should have tormented her with your detestable experiments, presuming, in your childish arrogance, that you could effect that by your wretched arts, which could only happen by the power of that sleeping talisman.
"And you, Master Flea, even to you it was not granted to pierce the mystery, for thy clear sight had not yet the power to penetrate the depths of earth, and see the frozen carbuncle.