te workmanship and
appointments, that sparkled as the mellow light poured in upon it. M.
Dantes knelt beside the ebony table on which this casket rested, and for
some moments seemed absorbed in prayer; then, rising and taking the
casket in his hands, he touched a spring, when the lid flew open,
disclosing a miniature portrait of Haydee, set in a frame of gold,
ornamented with flashing diamonds and emeralds; he gazed long and
lovingly at this portrait, that seemed designed to show how exquisitely
fair God's creatures may be, after which he kissed it reverently, closed
the casket, restored it to the table, and slowly dropped the hangings to
their place. Resuming his walk, he said, mournfully: "But the deepest
wound will close; the heaviest grief, the bitterest woe, becomes
assuaged. Time, the comforter, soothes and consoles. From this stroke of
bereavement I at length awoke, and, at the same moment, awoke to the
conviction that my whole past had been an error; that my life had been a
lie; that the years which had succeeded my imprisonment had been more
utterly lost than those passed within my dungeon itself; and there came
to me the conviction that time, talent, power and wealth had been worse
than wasted--that the wondrous riches, undreamed of save in the wildest
flights of oriental fiction, and by a miracle bestowed upon me, were
designed for nobler, holier purposes than to subserve a fiendish and
blasphemous vengeance for even unutterable wrongs, or to minister to the
gratification of pride, and the satisfaction of selfish tastes and
appetites, however refined and sublimated.

"I looked around me--the world was full of misery--and the same
disposition which had plunged me into a dungeon was crushing the hearts
and hopes of millions of my race. My bosom softened by bereavement
yearned toward my suffering fellows, and the path of duty, peace and
happiness seemed open to my desolate and despairing heart. Resolution
followed conviction; the world was my field; liberty, equality and
fraternity were my objects. Not France alone, with her miserable
millions, but Russia with her serfs, Poland with her wrongs, the
enslaved Italian, the oppressed German, the starving son of Erin, the
squalid operative of England, the priest-ridden slave of Jesuit Spain,
and the oppressed but free-born Switzer. Great men and good men I found
had already, with superhuman skill, constructed a system, a machine for
the amelioration of mankind's cond