own by its bubbling jets and fountains as she had done before, but
not thoughtlessly. The spirit of Aphiz seemed to her to be ever by
her side, and she would talk to him as though he was actually
present, in soft and tender whispers, and sing the songs of their
native valley with low and witching cadence; and thus she was
partially happy, for the soul is where it loves, rather than where
it lives. From childhood she had been taught to believe the
Swedenborgian doctrine, of the presence of the spirits of those who
have gone before us to the better land; and she deemed, as we have
said, that Aphiz Adegah was ever by her side, listening to her, and
sympathizing with all she did and said.

It is a happy faith, that the disembodied spirits of those whom we
have loved and respected here are still, though invisible, watching
over us with tender solicitude. Such a realization must be
chastening in its influence, for who would do an unworthy deed,
believing his every act visible to those eyes that he had delighted
to please on earth? And yet, could we but realize it, there is
always one eye, the Infinite and Supreme One, ever upon us, and
should we not be equally sensitive in our doings beneath his ever
present being?

It was the character of Komel's belief as to the spirits of the
departed, that rendered her so calm and resigned, though the Sultan,
in his blindness, attributed it to the forgetfulness engendered by
time, and smiled to himself to think how quickly the fickle girl had
forgotten one whose ardent devotion to her cost him his life. "She
scarcely deserved this fidelity on his part," said the monarch, with
a dark frown, as the memory of the gallant service the young
Circassian had done him when he was beset by the Bedouins, flashed
across his mind, rendering even his hardened spirit, for a moment,
uneasy. "The difficulty, after all," he said to him himself, "is not
so much to die for one we love, as to find one worthy of dying for."
Shaking an extra dose of the powdered drug into the bowl of his
pipe, the blue smoke curled away in tiny clouds above his head,
while its narcotic effect soon lulled both mental and physical
faculties into a state of dreamy insensibility.

What ardent spirits are to our countrymen, opium is in the East,
except, perhaps that the powerful drug is more exalting in its
stimulating influences, and less vile in its immediate effects; but
no less severe is it to hurry those who indulge in such