has no need that age should bring to her faces that are already wrinkled. Nevertheless, if you are possessed by the desire to put yourself under tutelage at your age, and to decipher the awful alphabet of Wisdom, well and good, come to me, I will do what I can. I will not bid you, poor graybeard, go visit the sepulchral chambers of the Pyramids, of which the ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the brick tower of Babylon, nor the vast marble sanctuary of the Indian Temple of Eklinga. I have not seen, any more than you have, the Chaldean walls built in accordance with the sacred formula of Sikra, nor the Temple of Solomon which was destroyed, nor the stone doors of the sepulchres of the Kings of Israel which are broken in pieces. Such fragments of the Book of Hermes as we have here will suffice us. I will explain to you the statue of Saint-Christopher, the symbol of the Sower, and that of the two angels in the door of the Sainte-Chapelle, of whom one has his hand in a stone vessel, and the other in a cloud.”

Here Jacques Coictier, who had been quite confounded by the Archdeacon’s tempestuous flow of eloquence, recovered his composure and struck in with the triumphant tone of one scholar setting another right:

“Erras, amice Claudi—there you are in error. The symbol is not the numeral. You mistake Orpheus for Hermes.”

“It is you who are in error,” returned the Archdeacon with dignity; “Dædalus is the foundation; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the edifice—the whole structure. Come whenever it please you,” he continued, turning to Tourangeau. “I will show you the particles of gold left in the bottom of Nicolas Flamel’s crucible which you can compare with the gold of Guillaume de Paris. I will instruct you in the secret virtues of the Greek word peristera. But before all things, you shall read, one after another, the letters of the marble alphabet, the pages of the granite book. We will go from the doorway of Bishop Guillaume and of Saint-Jean le Rond to the Sainte-Chapelle, then to the house of Nicolas Flamel in the Rue Marivault, to his tomb in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, to his two hospices in the Rue de Montmorency. You shall read the hieroglyphics with which the four great iron bars in the porch of the Hospice of Saint-Gervais are covered. Together we will spell out the façades of Saint-Côme, of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Ardents, Saint-Martin, Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie—”

For some time past, Tourangeau, with all his intelligence, appeared unable to follow Dom Claude. He broke in now:

“Pasque Dieu! but what are these books of yours?”

“Here is one,” replied the Archdeacon; and opening the window of his cell, he pointed to the mighty Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the black silhouette of its two towers, its stone sides, and its huge roof sharply outlined against the starry sky, and looking like an enormous two-headed sphinx crouching in the midst of the city.

For some moments the Archdeacon contemplated the gigantic edifice in silence; then, sighing deeply, he pointed with his right hand to the printed book lying open on his table, and with his left to Notre-Dame, and casting a mournful glance from the book to the church:

“Alas!” he said. “This will destroy that.”

Coictier, who had bent eagerly over the book, could not repress an exclamation of disappointment. “Hé! but what is there so alarming in this? Glossa in Epistolas Pauli. Norimbergæ, Antonius Koburger 1474. That is not new. It is a book of Petrus Lombardus, the Magister Sententiarum. Do you mean because it is printed?”

“You have said it,” returned Claude, who stood apparently absorbed in profound meditation, with his finger on the folio which had issued from the famous printing-press of Nuremberg. Presently he uttered these dark words: “Woe! woe! the small brings down the great; a tooth triumphs over a whole mass! The Nile rat destroys the crocodile, the sword-fish destroys the whale, the book will destroy the edifice!”