attractive presence to those that overlooked an expression of 

 low cunning, and he acquired a courtly manner which com- 

 bined with unbounded assurance helped his subtle schemes; 

 he won over the Emperor completely, promising him all sorts 

 of impossible things, allowing him to taste an Elixir of Life 

 of his secret manufacture, and giving him a powder warranted 

 to produce gold, being a portion of that found in an ivory 

 ball at the tomb of St. Dunstan. In his experiments before 

 the Emperor, Kelley used legerdemain rather than metallurgi- 

 cal knowledge, rumor magnified his seeming success and his 

 fame became great throughout Prague. Rudolph gave him a 

 large salary as court alchemist, and endowed him with 

 landed estates ; he even raised the scheming charlatan to the 

 dignity of a Knight of the Bohemian Kingdom, the royal 

 patent, dated the twenty-third of February, 1590, naming 

 Sir Edward a "Golden Knight." (Eques auratus.) 



In devising transmutation schemes to deceive the Emperor 

 the golden Knight was obliged to avoid the well-known 

 tricks that Dr. von Hayek had exposed at the conference on 

 alchemy held in his parlors, and he succeeded in arranging a 

 new one that had the merits of safety, simplicity and origin- 

 ality. The crafty knave informed his Majesty that he should 

 make a projection with his own royal hands, and that he, 

 Kelley, would not touch the crucibles, the coals or the in- 

 gredients, nor would he permit himself or his assistant to 

 approach the furnace during the operation. Kelley had had 

 constructed a large wooden box with a strong horizontal 

 partition, ostensibly to hold the apparatus employed ; beneath 

 the shallow tray he concealed his brother, who was both 

 short and slight and capable of curling up into a surprisingly 

 small space. When the day arrived for the grand demonstra- 

 tion, the heavy box was placed in the imperial laboratory 

 tinder Kelley 's orders, and from it Rudolph's trusted alchemists 



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