He looked like some old alchemist busied with unnatural things.

The old alchemist had been slain among his crucibles; his scrolls were preserved with jealous care.

The old alchemist was a secretive and pretentious person and used to invent queer names for the purpose of mystifying and awing the ignorant.

Were the old alchemists atheists as well as dreamers in their attempts to transmute earth into gold?

If he conveys his wisdom after the fashion of the old alchemists, he may as well let it alone.

The old alchemists, who thought that gold was decomposable and therefore creatable, shrank from the idea of producing the diamond.

The acetic acid, evolved by distilling acetate of copper (verdigris), is the true "aromatic" vinegar of the old alchemists.

"But Eldorado is my home," interposed the old Alchemist.

'You are a bold man to assert that now and then the old alchemists actually did make gold,' she said.

"Yet you behold," continued the old alchemist, casting an inexpressibly mournful glance around the wretched apartment, "the way we live.

"Doesn't it call up ideas of what you conceive the quarters of the old alchemists to have been hundreds of years ago."

"Certainly," interposed the old Alchemist; "you may be sure that you will not get into the Hole, until you have left yourself behind."