ench of the conspiracy for their destruction. In my
day-dreaming I have talked with these; and learned with delight of
their bliss in their eternal hunting-grounds. And as I have knelt here,
they in hosts have come to me with all their legends and long accounts
against the white man, and I have wept above these dry bones, and felt
too it was the fate of the white man, when his mission shall have been
completed on earth, and his nation's age bear him into the ground, and
only his legends shall live a tradition, like that of the Natchez.

"The hieroglyphics of Thotmes, of Rameses, of Menephthah, and of the
host of kings gone before these in Egypt's old life, cannot be read;
their language, letters, and traditions, too, sleep beyond the
revelations of time, and yet their tombs, like these, give up their
bones to the curious, who group through the catacombs, or dig at the
base of their monumental pyramids. All besides has passed away and is
lost. Not even the color of the great people who filled these
monuments, and carved from the solid stone these miles of galleries,
now filled to repletion with their mummied dead, and whose capacity is
sufficient to entomb the dead of a nation for thousands of years, is
known now to those who people the fields reclaimed from the forest
beyond the memory of time.

"Nations are born, have their periods of youthful vigor, their manhood
of sturdy strength, the tottering of decrepit age, the imbecility of
superstitious dotage--and their death is final extinction. Such is man,
and such is the world. What we are, we know; what we shall be, we know
not, save that we only leave a pile of bones. Come, we are approaching
home, and the moon dares to shine, ere yet the sun has gone. Yonder is
brother, and I expect a scolding; but let him fret--it is not often I
have a toy. Fate threw you in my way and you must not complain if I use
you."

"I shall not complain," replied the astonished young man; "but will you
ride again to-morrow?"

She checked up her steed (a noble one he was) and seemed to take in his
entire man, as slowly her eye went up from his stirrup to his face,
when she said: "To-morrow, ah, to-morrow! Who can tell what to-morrow
may bring forth? To you and to me, there may come no to-morrow. We may
in a twinkling be hurled from our sphere into oblivion. The earth may
open to-night, or even now, and we may drop into her bosom of liquid
fire, and be only ashes to-morrow.

"'Take no heed