The Room In The Dragon Volant by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
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The Room In The Dragon Volant
by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
1872
PROLOGUE
THE curious case which I am about to place before you, is referred to, very pointedly, and more than once, in the extraordinary Essay upon the Drugs of the Dark and the Middle Ages, from the pen of Doctor Hesselius.
This Essay he entitles Mortis Imago, and he, therein, discusses the Vinum letiferum, the Beatifica, the Somnus Angelorum, the Hypnus Sagarum, the Aqua Thessalliæ, and about twenty other infusions and distillations, well known to the sages of eight hundred years ago, and two of which are still, he alleges, known to the fraternity of thieves, and, among them, as police-office inquiries sometimes disclose to this day, in practical use.
The Essay, Mortis Imago, will occupy, as nearly as I can at present calculate, two volumes, the ninth and tenth, of the collected papers of Dr Martin Hesselius.
This Essay, I may remark in conclusion, is very curiously enriched by citations, in great abundance, from mediæval verse and prose romance, some of the most valuable of which, strange to say, are Egyptian.
I have selected this particular statement from among many cases equally striking, but hardly, I think, so effective as mere narratives; in this irregular form of publication, it is simply as a story that I present it.
CHAPTER I
ON THE ROAD
IN the eventful year, 1815, I was exactly three-and-twenty, and had just succeeded to a very large sum in