ffer, to the men the fuel stowed in the outhouse. Both
were borne away and placed within the litter. Meanwhile, I took from
the table, on which it was carelessly thrown, the light hatchet that I
habitually carried with me in my rambles.

"Do you think that you need that idle weapon?" said Margrave. "Do you
fear the good faith of my swarthy attendants?"

"Nay, take the hatchet yourself; its use is to sever the gold from the
quartz in which we may find it embedded, or to clear, as this shovel,
which will also be needed, from the slight soil above it, the ore that
the mine in the mountain flings forth, as the sea casts its waifs on the
sands."

"Give me your hand, fellow-labourer!" said Margrave, joyfully. "Ah,
there is no faltering terror in this pulse! I was not mistaken in the
Man. What rests, but the Place and the Hour? I shall live! I shall
live!"

CHAPTER LXXXI.

Margrave now entered the litter, and the Veiled Woman drew the black
curtains round him. I walked on, as the guide, some yards in
advance. The air was still, heavy, and parched with the breath of the
Australasian sirocco.

We passed through the meadow-lands, studded with slumbering flocks; we
followed the branch of the creek, which was linked to its source in
the mountains by many a trickling waterfall; we threaded the gloom of
stunted, misshapen trees, gnarled with the stringy bark which makes one
of the signs of the strata that nourish gold; and at length the moon,
now in all her pomp of light, mid-heaven amongst her subject stars,
gleamed through the fissures of the cave, on whose floor lay the relics
of antediluvian races, and rested in one flood of silvery splendour upon
the hollows of the extinct volcano, with tufts of dank herbage, and wide
spaces of paler sward, covering the gold below,--Gold, the dumb symbol
of organized Matter's great mystery, storing in itself, according as
Mind, the informer of Matter, can distinguish its uses, evil and good,
bane and blessing.

Hitherto the Veiled Woman had remained in the rear, with the
white-robed, skeleton-like image that had crept to my side unawares with
its noiseless step. Thus in each winding turn of the difficult path at
which the convoy following behind me came into sight, I had seen, first,
the two gayly-dressed, armed men, next the black bier-like litter, and
last the Black-veiled Woman and the White-robed Skeleton.

But now, as I halted on the tableland, backed by the mountain and
fr