way from him into nothingness. With a single
glance this strange being led him in spirit through the spheres where
meditation leads the learned man, prayer the pious heart, where vision
transports the artist, and sleep the souls of men,--each and all have
their own path to the Height, their own guide to reach it, their own
individual sufferings in the dire return. In that sphere alone all veils
are rent away, and the revelation, the awful flaming certainty of an
unknown world, of which the soul brings back mere fragments to this
lower sphere, stands revealed. To Wilfrid one hour passed with Seraphita
was like the sought-for dreams of Theriakis, in which each knot of
nerves becomes the centre of a radiating delight. But he left her
bruised and wearied as some young girl endeavoring to keep step with a
giant.

The cold air, with its stinging flagellations, had begun to still
the nervous tremors which followed the reunion of his two natures, so
powerfully disunited for a time; he was drawn towards the parsonage,
then towards Minna, by the sight of the every-day home life for which
he thirsted as the wandering European thirsts for his native land when
nostalgia seizes him amid the fairy scenes of Orient that have seduced
his senses. More weary than he had ever yet been, Wilfrid dropped into
a chair and looked about him for a time, like a man who awakens from
sleep. Monsieur Becker and his daughter accustomed, perhaps, to the
apparent eccentricity of their guest, continued the employments in which
they were engaged.

The parlor was ornamented with a collection of the shells and insects
of Norway. These curiosities, admirably arranged on a background of the
yellow pine which panelled the room, formed, as it were, a rich tapestry
to which the fumes of tobacco had imparted a mellow tone. At the further
end of the room, opposite to the door, was an immense wrought-iron
stove, carefully polished by the serving-woman till it shone like
burnished steel. Seated in a large tapestried armchair near the stove,
before a table, with his feet in a species of muff, Monsieur Becker was
reading a folio volume which was propped against a pile of other books
as on a desk. At his left stood a jug of beer and a glass, at his right
burned a smoky lamp fed by some species of fish-oil. The pastor seemed
about sixty years of age. His face belonged to a type often painted by
Rembrandt; the same small bright eyes, set in wrinkles and surmounted by
t