ital. A galley ready to weigh anchor was constantly at the disposal of
the commandant of the fortress, and the next noon the noble pair, with
Hermon and his faithful Bias, went on board the Galatea.

The weather was dull, and gray clouds were sweeping across the sky over
the swift vessel, which hugged the coast, and, unless the wind shifted,
would reach the narrow tongue of land pierced by the Sebennytic mouth of
the Nile before sunrise.

Though the general and his wife went to rest early, Hermon could not
endure the close air of the cabin. Wrapped in his cloak he went on deck.
The moon, almost full, was sailing in the sky, sometimes covered by dark
clouds, sometimes leaving them behind. Like a swan emerging from the
shadow of the thickets along the shore upon the pure bosom of the lake,
it finally floated into the deep azure of the radiant firmament. Hermon's
heart swelled.

How he rejoiced that he was again permitted to behold the starry sky, and
satiate his soul with the beauty of creation! What delight it gave him
that the eternal wanderers above were no longer soulless forms, that he
again saw in the pure silver disk above friendly Selene, in the rolling
salt waves the kingdom of Poseidon! To-morrow, when the deep blue water
was calm, he would greet the sea-god Glaucus, and when snowy foam crowned
the crests of the waves, white-armed Thetis. The wind was no longer an
empty sound to him; no, it, too, came from a deity. All Nature had
regained a new, divine life. Doubtless he felt much nearer to his
childhood than before, but he was infinitely less distant from the
eternal divinity. And all the forms, so full of meaning, which appeared
to him from Nature, and from every powerful emotion of his own soul, were
waiting to be represented by his art in the noblest of forms, those of
human beings. There were few with whose nature he had not become familiar
in the darkness and solitude that once surrounded him.

When he began to create again, he had only to summon them, and he
awaited, with the suspense of the general who is in command of new troops
on the eve of battle, the success of his own work after the great
transformation which had taken place in him.

What a stress and tumult!

He had controlled it since the first hour when he regained his full
vision. He would fain have transformed the moon into the sun, the ship
into the studio, and begun to model.

He knew, too, what he desired to create.

He would model