mpression of my own treacherous senses) might be but the
natural effect of elements struggling yet under a soil unmistakably
charred by volcanoes. The luminous atoms dissolved in the caldron
might as little be fraught with a vital elixir as are the splendours of
naphtha or phosphor. As it was, the weird rite had no magic result. The
magician was not rent limb from limb by the fiends. By causes as natural
as ever extinguished life's spark in the frail lamp of clay, he had died
out of sight--under the black veil.

What mattered henceforth to Faith, in its far grander questions and
answers, whether Reason, in Faber, or Fancy, in me, supplied the more
probable guess at a hieroglyph which, if construed aright, was but a
word of small mark in the mystical language of Nature? If all the arts
of enchantment recorded by Fable were attested by facts which Sages were
forced to acknowledge, Sages would sooner or later find some cause
for such portents--not supernatural. But what Sage, without cause
supernatural, both without and within him, can guess at the wonders he
views in the growth of a blade of grass, or the tints on an insect's
wing? Whatever art Man can achieve in his progress through time, Man's
reason, in time, can suffice to explain. But the wonders of God? These
belong to the Infinite; and these, O Immortal! will but develop new
wonder on wonder, though thy sight be a spirit's, and thy leisure to
track and to solve an eternity.

As I raised my face from my clasped hands, my eyes fell full upon a
form standing in the open doorway. There, where on the night in which
Lilian's long struggle for reason and life had begun, the Luminous
Shadow had been beheld in the doubtful light of a dying moon and a yet
hazy dawn; there, on the threshold, gathering round her bright locks
the aureole of the glorious sun, stood Amy, the blessed child! And as I
gazed, drawing nearer and nearer to the silenced house, and that Image
of Peace on its threshold, I felt that Hope met me at the door,--Hope in
the child's steadfast eyes, Hope in the child's welcoming smile!

"I was at watch for you," whispered Amy. "All is well."

"She lives still--she lives! Thank God! thank God!"

"She lives,--she will recover!" said another voice, as my head sunk on
Faber's shoulder. "For some hours in the night her sleep was disturbed,
convulsed. I feared, then, the worst. Suddenly, just before the dawn,
she called out aloud, still in sleep,--

"'The cold a