mountain, beneath which lay the earth of green vale, and threading river, dotted with grain and villages and cities. It was spring-time, and flowers lay upon the bright grass, trees wore their leaves of pale and darker green; ploughed earth lay flat and brown; the sea smiled its sparkling smile under the kindly sun; church-spires glittered, and a thousand roofs shone like sheets of silver.

Now they were in a valley. Over their heads waved the palm. The orangetree held out its golden globes. The air was full of the scent of spices and the hum of life.

The landscape

Again they were swept from this to another resting-spot. stretched away, undulating with many a wave of hill and vale; here a forest, there a range of massive mountains, a rippling lake, rivers winding curiously from point to point, the distant sea, rock-crowned cliffs; every feature of all the earth. It was autumn now, and the brightest flowers were in bloom. The forest-leaves were changing. Now the forests were God's great clusters - His bouquets of flowers. The corn lances were golden; the heath was brown; the carpet of the valley, green. The very air was filled to the verge of intoxication with the gorgeousness of color.

The tints were brightening in the setting sun; the clouds put on their crimson and golden glory, till their piled brightness, massive, turret-crowned, glowing, seemed like the gate-way to the home of God.

The sun went down. The colors gently faded, the sky released its tint of blue, the stars came peeping out, and the autumn night put on its mellow beauty.

Again they floated away. Pausing, the presence touched her lips to Rella's eyes, saying, as they seemed to fall toward the maiden's couch: 'I seal these outer eyes again, for in the earth-life He never opens such as these. But you will not be sad, Rella, nor yet ungrateful, for your inner sight is opened, and you can never be the blind girl that you were.'

Oh! how like was that pressure of the hand to Herbert's!

The morning sun pierced a crevice between the drooping curtains of Rella's chamber, shot little globules of light upon a tiny hand which lay upon the counterpane. Rella woke. Her sight was indeed sealed, but the pictures of the night were far more clear and vivid than those that memory ever keeps for us who see. With that unsealed inner sight she saw the wealth of light and blush, the hue of grass, the thousand tints of flowers, the shape of trees, the laughter of waters. Long lay little Rella in her nest, blissfully recalling these brilliant pictures in all their glory and detail.

Herbert opened an office in the metropolis. He gave his time and his energies to his profession, working, battling. He met men in bodies, and swayed them. He met them individually, and conquered them. He was marked among his fellows as superior, and his fame was spreading through the waters of society like the wave-circles of lakes. His power was largely intellectual, but also personal — heart-power. That magnetism which belongs to a noble, sympathetic nature, gave him an influence and position to which a large measure of mental strength alone will never lift a man.

Mr. Manton was courted; by the rich, because he often held their interests in his hand; by the poor, because he had a heart for them and met them as true men, not less noble because the leaves of their life-history were not gilded on the edge; by women, because they saw in him what every woman craves yet seldom finds, a heart-wealth which gives a man to know the sensitiveness of the harp-strung nature submitted to his will.

True, in his devotion to the little blind girl's will, Herbert sought, with a sense not unlike that of religious duty, to find some one whom he could love, at least, could care for as a wife. Very little would the man have sought had he been sure that Rella loved him. But feeling it half-wrong to have chosen a being of such ethereal purity, and conceiving that perhaps a sister's love was all that such an one could give to such as he, he went about this sober duty much as the home-sick pilgrim in the olden time began the long journey to Jerusalem.

Sometimes, in his movings among throngs, and his brief loiterings in drawing-rooms, a sparkle would attract his notice and an intellectual maiden mind would hold it for a time. Sometimes - he was human- the glitter of wealth and distinction flashed across his path, telling him how much was within his grasp. Once or twice his better self was strongly moved in sympathy for a superior nature held down by circumstances or petty tyranny; and when he held forth his strong hand to lift such a one, he saw a gushing and a gratitude which would have won him had he never loved.

But from all this, Herbert turned away dissatisfied. There was a something wanting a something made more real and oppressive with every day's experience.

What use to live a life like this? Home he goes to Rella's home — and tells it all over again, with the added story of his experience since. And Rella, with her head upon his shoulder, says: 'I have loved you all my life.'

Never again in all the years of their one life, did Rella need to ask what any colors or shapes were like. GOD had opened her inner sight, and Herbert's eyes were now her own.

THE MUMMY'S SOUL.

Ir was high noon, and fresh, luxuriant life without, and the darkness of mid-night and the dead, within this Egyptian tomb, hollowed out of the heart of the Libyan chain of mountains. Two hundred feet above me, massive ruins, half-buried beneath the yellow, glittering sands of the desert, were revealed as the skeleton of a city of gigantic wonders. Now, Thebes was not so desolate. The sculptured faces of colossi gazed with stern, tearless eyes over the waste, as if in mockery of the frailty of cotemporary creations. Around me were mummies, sculptures, and rough paintings on the walls. Life and death here touched each other, and were identified by the reality of mutual existence. A humanity of forgotten ages, by its ashes preached sermons of profoundest truths in stupendous charnel-houses. Yet I asked myself, in a spirit of unbelief of such truths, if the oracles of Egyptian mythology spoke falsely, when they asserted, that the soul, after three thousand years of pilgrimage to other shrines, would reïnvest the bodies of the dead with new life?

A startled bat flew in and out of an empty tomb; and an angry scorpion clicked his armor-plates, as he crept along the ledge of one of the crypts above me. A faint puff of air from the passage filled my nostrils with the sickening effluvia of mummies, and scattered the dust from the carvings of the pillar. I was in a casket of Death, and the jewels were mummies. Dead for centuries, yet alive in every thing but life; lacking only a breath of that life to cast off the swathing-cloths, and confront me! The thought of seeing them step from the tomb, in the hideousness of such a resurrection, made me shudder.

Yet, if their doctrine of a renewal of life after thirty centuries, were to prove true, there might at any moment be a resurrection, and a consequent paroxysm of terror on my part. What if I should be attacked, as I threaded intricate passages in this birth-place of antique horrors, by mobs of these resurrected Egyptians, infuriated by the sacrilege of my presence?

The mere idea of encountering their shrivelled forms in deadly struggle, and wrestling for victory with entwined limbs, while their crisp hair, odorous of the crypt, brushed my face; all these foolish promptings of an imagination, excited by my strange surroundings, together with a shuffling noise in a distant passage, caused me to drop my torch, and rush to the entrance of the tomb, where I stood quivering with fright, not knowing which way to turn. Fortunately, Ferraj, my guide, was the comer; else, in the darkness and sickening solitude, I should have become mad.

The tomb in which I stood had been discovered the previous day. It consisted of one large chamber with heavy arches, a massive pillar in the centre, and with three tiers of niches on each side; the fronts being ornamented with outline paintings of a brilliant red color. The ponderous carvings of the pillar were merely heavy lines of sculpture, with no delicacy of outline, no airy gracefulness to mar the effectiveness of their stupendous symmetry. Every curve and straight line on pillar and tablet was harsh, rigid, and even cruel in

its expression of power. The rough granite had been carved, in many cases, into crude and intricate delineations of human pageantry, by the ready skill of the patient artist. Yet, the hands that had cut and painted, day after day, in the service of cunning priest or mourning relative, had dropped the chisel and the brush thousands of years before, leaving outlines of works to be memorials of undeveloped grandeur.

Many of the niches in the tiers had been despoiled of their contents. One only remained untouched; upon its tablet was painted, in rich colors, a lotusflower, broken at the blossom. There was no inscription upon the tomb to designate its occupant; no legendary engraving of his or her life's events. The cement around the edges of the tablet was as hard as the rock in which the tomb was cut. A half-hour's labor with a crow-bar had but meagre result; so I placed a quantity of powder under the lower edge of the stone, where a small cavity had been made with the bar. There was a hissing noise as the fire ran up the fuse, followed by a dull sound of explosion, that was immediately hushed and smothered by the dead silence of the passages without. The slab with its painting fell to the ground, and was shattered.

Within the niche thus opened was a mummy-case, containing a mummy, bandaged from head to foot in fine linen, and lying upon a bed of crumbling flowers. I reproached myself, in a sorrowful, musing mood, for such a sacrilege, when I found it was the body of a woman. But a sickening, musty odor from the corpse spread its subtle essences throughout the chamber, and stealing to the brain intoxicated it. I seemed to see, in this momentary inebriation of the senses, the body of this mummy snap its cerements, and slowly recede through the rocky walls, which closed not after it; while it floated, in plain sight, down a passage, in the mountain, bordered by rows of tombs, one above another. And out of these graves of stone stretched bandaged arms of taw ny-skinned mummies, whose fingers vainly clutched at the phantom, as, motionless in features and limbs, it glided down the terrible aisle, and was lost in the gloom.

The agony of the vision was over. My forehead was covered with a cold perspiration, and my eyes ached with the fierce heat that had created the appalling vision; while white flames of light seemed, now and then, to mingle with the darkness of the corridor.

I looked behind me. Ferraj sat cowering upon the ground, with his hands covering his face.

'Ferraj!'

'Howadji! Brave Sidi! did you not see the body move and motion with its hands? Did it move away into the darkness?' he cried, seizing my hand. 'Of course not, you foolish fellow. Is it not there in the case? It is impossible for the dead to come to life.'

I laughed feebly to put him in good spirits; but he was not at all reässured, and I noticed that, while we remained in the tomb, he stood at a distance from the mummy, holding his torch like a sword, as if to parry a blow from unseen hands. ·

In profound awe, and with a delicate touch, I unwrapped the face of the

body. A woman's features, black and shrivelled, were revealed.

I was

startled even sickened at the hideous revelation. For an instant I had forgotten my situation, and its surroundings, and remembered only an occasion when I turned back the coffin-lid, and gazed for the last time upon the face of my dead sister. I thought, in my reverie over this mummy, of a lovely face, and fair features, like marble. Imagination had never conjured up so shocking a vision. But my zeal as an antiquary suppressed delicate dreams and disagreeable realities. This woman might have been handsome in the era in which she existed; she was, perhaps, considered as the possessor of great beauty. She was very short, slight, with a low forehead; the cheek-bones were high, but not prominent, and the nose delicate and small; the eyes, the windows to a woman's soul, were closed in a sleep of centuries. Her hair was black, curled, and somewhat faded. Her mouth was small, exquisitely formed, and the lips were devoid of any heaviness of curve to mark the tincture of Ethiopian blood. But the dark, parchment-like skin, wrinkled and rough, made me loathe the corpse, and to wonder at the love that thus burned out beauty, by slow consuming fires of subtle chemistry; and laid away the shell of the soul, that it might once more be reïnvigorated with a life that in its wanderings had animated beast, bird, or insect, and acquired strength at each succeeding transmigration. As I unwrapped the long bandages from the breast, a strong gust of wind rushed from the desert into the dim crypts of the mountains. It flared the expiring torches, scattered dust from pillar and niche, and caused the mummy to crumble into a nauseous powder, that half-choked me with its subtle essence of humanity. From a mass of beads and shreds of cloth, I picked out a stone scarabæus, on whose back was graven many minute hieroglyphics. I succeeded in translating the following: Three thousand years hence, a new life.' So the prophecy had been refuted, and dust returned to dust, I said to myself. But the doubt whether the resurrection predicted would not reform this dust into a re-created body, intruded itself, and strengthened the imagination, which hoped it would be so.

In the crypt, at the head of the body, I found a tiny vase of green translu cent stone, of antique form, embellished with exquisitely carved devices. From either side sprang a serpent, which extended upward with light, graceful curves, until with its hideous fangs it indented the delicate rim of the vase. It was so fragile that it seemed as if a touch from the most careful fingers would crush it to atoms. I accidentally inverted it, and there fell upon the floor a quantity of light, fine ashes, and an insect of enormous size. It lay upon the ground, at my feet, with outstretched wings. Ferraj stooped down, and taking it in his hand, gazed upon it for a minute, his lips quivering, and his hand trembling so much that his torch almost fell to the ground.

'Efrit! Efrit! a foul devil!' he shouted, and cast the thing from him into the remains of the mummy. Picking it up, I examined it carefully, but with an indescribable loathing, that seized me whenever I saw the vile thing.

It was a fly, six inches long, with a head the size and shape of a pea; and appeared like a globule of liquid silver. Its small white eyes sparkled with the brilliancy of a diamond, and projected slightly from the head. The body was