f Prester John, that mysterious Christian
empire, rarely visited by European eye?'

'There are legends of two such,' said Lancelot, 'an Ethiopian and an
Asiatic one; and the Ethiopian, if we are to believe Colonel
Harris's Journey to Shoa, is a sufficiently miserable failure.'

'True; the day of the Chamitic race is past; you will not say the
same of our Caucasian empire. To our race the present belongs,--to
England, France, Germany, America,--to us. Will you see what we
have done, and, perhaps, bring home, after long wanderings, a
message for your country which may help to unravel the tangled web
of this strange time?'

'I will,' said Lancelot, 'now, this moment. And yet, no. There is
one with whom I have promised to share all future weal and woe.
Without him I can take no step.'

'Tregarva?'

'Yes--he. What made you guess that I spoke of him?'

'Mellot told me of him, and of you, too, six weeks ago. He is now
gone to fetch him from Manchester. I cannot trust him here in
England yet. The country made him sad; London has made him mad;
Manchester may make him bad. It is too fearful a trial even for his
faith. I must take him with us.'

'What interest in him--not to say what authority over him--have
you?'

'The same which I have over you. You will come with me; so will he.
It is my business, as my name signifies, to save the children alive
whom European society leaves carelessly and ignorantly to die. And
as for my power, I come,' said he, with a smile, 'from a country
which sends no one on its errands without first thoroughly
satisfying itself as to his power of fulfilling them.'

'If he goes, I go with you.'

'And he will go. And yet, think what you do. It is a fearful
journey. They who travel it, even as they came naked out of their
mother's womb--even as they return thither, and carry nothing with
them of all which they have gotten in this life, so must those who
travel to my land.'

'What? Tregarva? Is he, too, to give up all? I had thought that I
saw in him a precious possession, one for which I would barter all
my scholarship, my talents,--ay--my life itself.'

'A possession worth your life? What then?'

'Faith in an unseen God.'

'Ask him whether he would call that a possession--his own in any
sense?'

'He would call it a revelation to him.'

'That is, a taking of the veil from something which was behind the
veil already.'

'Yes.'

'And wh