tenderly, silently, drew the young head to her lap, and it
vanished from my sight behind her black veil.

I knelt beside her, murmuring some trite words of comfort; but she
heeded me not, rocking herself to and fro as the mother who cradles a
child to sleep. Soon the fast-flickering sparkles of the lost elixir
died out on the grass; and with their last sportive diamond-like tremble
of light, up, in all the suddenness of Australian day, rose the sun,
lifting himself royally above the mountain-tops, and fronting the meaner
blaze of the forest as a young king fronts his rebels. And as there,
where the bush-fires had ravaged, all was a desert, so there, where
their fury had not spread, all was a garden. Afar, at the foot of the
mountains, the fugitive herds were grazing; the cranes, flocking back
to the pools, renewed the strange grace of their gambols; and the great
kingfisher, whose laugh, half in mirth, half in mockery, leads the choir
that welcome the morn,--which in Europe is night,--alighted bold on
the roof of the cavern, whose floors were still white with the bones of
races, extinct before--so helpless through instincts, so royal through
Soul--rose Man!

But there, on the ground where the dazzling elixir had wasted its
virtues,--there the herbage already had a freshness of verdure which,
amid the duller sward round it, was like an oasis of green in a desert.
And there wild-flowers, whose chill hues the eye would have scarcely
distinguished the day before, now glittered forth in blooms of
unfamiliar beauty. Towards that spot were attracted myriads of happy
insects, whose hum of intense joy was musically loud. But the form of
the life-seeking sorcerer lay rigid and stark; blind to the bloom of the
wild-flowers, deaf to the glee of the insects,--one hand still resting
heavily on the rim of the emptied caldron, and the face still hid behind
the Black Veil. What! the wondrous elixir, sought with such hope and
well-nigh achieved through such dread, fleeting back to the earth from
which its material was drawn, to give bloom, indeed,--but to herbs: joy
indeed,--but to insects!

And now, in the flash of the sun, slowly wound up the slopes that led to
the circle the same barbaric procession which had sunk into the valley
under the ray of the moon. The armed men came first, stalwart and tall,
their vests brave with crimson and golden lace, their weapons gayly
gleaming with holiday silver. After them, the Black Litter. As th