forward, she tapped it with her fingers or her knuckles, until all
its brazen disks tingled and its little bells gave out a sweet and
silvery tintinnabulation.

The dancer's movements were alternately sinuous, undulatory and gliding.
At one moment her supple form, bending humbly toward the earth,
resembled the stem of a lily over-weighted with its blossom; the next, a
branch of a tree flung upward by a tempest; the next, a column of autumn
leaves caught up by a miniature whirlwind and sent spinning along a
winding path.

Her eyes glowed, her cheeks burned and her bosom heaved with excitement.
She seemed either to have caught from nature her own mood, or else to
have communicated hers to it, for while she danced all else danced with
her, the water in the brook, the squirrels in the tree-tops, the shadows
on the moss, and the leaves on the branches.

Following the directions of the parchment, she continued to spin and
flutter around the fire until the water in the kettle began to boil. At
the first ebullitions, she stood poised for an instant upon her toe,
like the famous statue of Mercury, and so lightly that she seemed to be
sustained by undiscoverable wings, or to float, like a bubble, of her
own buoyancy.

Settling down at length as if she were a hummingbird lighting upon a
flower, she began to circle slowly around the fire and sing. The melody
was in a minor key and full of weird pathos. The words were these:

"God of the gypsy camp, Matizan, Matizan,
Open the future to me--
Me thy true worshiper, here in this solitude,
Offering this incense to thee.

"Matizan, Matizan, God of the future days,
Come in the smoke and the fire;
Kaffaran, Kaffaran, Muzsubar, Zanzarbee;
Bundemar, Omadar, Zire."

As the last syllable fell from her lips, the loathsome decoction boiled
over, and the singer, pausing as if suddenly turned to marble, stood in
statuesque beauty, her arms extended, her lips parted, her eyes fixed.
Expectancy gave place to surprise, surprise to disappointment,
disappointment to despair.

The lips began to quiver, the eyes to fill with tears; her girlish
figure suddenly collapsed and sank upon the ground as the sail of a
vessel falls to the deck when a sudden blast of wind has snapped its
cordage.

While the broken-hearted and disillusioned priestess lay prostrate
there, the fire spluttered, the birds sang cheerfully in the treetops,
and the brook murmu