ce, save that
their sympathetic souls were all the while communing with each
other. At last they came to a spot from whence the lovely valley
opened just below them, when suddenly Aphiz pointed to a projecting
and dead limb of a tree far beneath them, and asked Komel if she
remembered the scene of the hawk and dove.

"Alas! dear Aphiz, but too well. It was indeed an unheeded warning."

"But the dove is once more restored now, dearest, and we must look
only for happy omens."

"I have seen so much of sadness, Aphiz," she answered, "that I shall
only the more dearly prize the quiet peacefulness of our native
hills."

"Thus too is it with me. A few months of excitement, toil, danger
and unhappiness abroad, has endeared each spot that we have loved in
our childhood still more strongly to me."

"Then shall good come out of evil, dear Aphiz, inasmuch as we shall
now live content."

"Have you seen Captain Selim this morning, Komel?" he asked.

"Yes, and I fear he is ill, some heavy weight seems to be upon his
heart."

"Let us seek him then, for we owe all to his manliness and courage."

As the twilight hour once crept over hill and valley, the evening
meal was spread on the open lawn before the cottage, and when this
was over, all sat there and told of the events that had passed, and
each other's experiences, for the few past months, during which time
Komel had remained a prisoner at the Sultan's palace. Of Selim, they
knew only so much of his history as was connected with themselves,
and he was asked to relate his story.

"Mine has been a life of little interest," he said, "save to myself
alone. Of my birth and parentage I know nothing, and my earliest
recollections carry me back to the period when I was a boy on board
a Trebizond merchantman, at a time when I was just recovering from
what is called the Asia fever, a malady that often attacks those who
come from the north of the Black Sea to the Asia coast to live. This
fever leaves the invalid deranged for weeks, and when he recovers
from it, he is like an infant and obliged from that hour to
cultivate his brain as from earliest childhood, and he can recall
nothing of the past. Thus I lost the years of my life up to the age
of eight or nine.

"I served in that ship until I was its first officer, and by good
luck, having been once employed in one of the Sultan's ships as a
pilot during a fierce gale, through which I was enabled, by my good
luck, to carry the sh