Old Experiment

Rummaging around the attic she found a dusty, worn, and very old looking book. It was too old to be her dad’s college book. She would learn that he inherited it from a retiring professor who salvaged it as a young man from a dilapidated library scheduled for demolition.  Little did she know it was a surviving work of alchemy. Its experiments were coded with symbols and secret markings. Just then she got an idea for the upcoming science fair, and thought her dad wouldn’t realize, but he soon got wise when she asked, “How much is a tincture of blackened zinc dust, assuming a person might want to weigh that out?”