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The same night his wife left him, he began his experiments. With drawn curtains, fearing to be taken for an anarchist, he worked with a smelting furnace fire in a Dutch stove and six crucibles of fine china bought for money “stolen from himself” in order to demonstrate that there is carbonaceous matter in sulphur and that sulphur, therefore, is not an element. Towards morning he thought he had found carbon in the residue of the sulphur and that thus he had “upset standard chemistry” and attained to that “immortality which mortals grant.”

He was jealously anxious about his great discovery and did not dare to let it be known among the authorities. He wished to prove also that sulphur contains hydrogen and oxygen, but he did not possess enough apparatus. His monthly allowances he had spent in experiments, he ceased to take regular meals, and besides, during the first “sulphur-night,” he had burned his hand so severely that the skin peeled off and he could not touch anything without feeling pain.

“My hands were black as want, bleeding as my heart,” he complains in Inferno.

But at the same time, he begins to speak of Unknown Powers which had persecuted him for years and put obstacles in his way. He is surrounded by a frightfully solemn, empty silence, and this induces him to challenge the Invisible One to wrestle with him body to body and soul against soul.

Thus the “atheistic” free-thinker, the convert to the occult sciences, has no sooner stepped over the threshold of the temple of the magians than he conjures up “an