between that prisoner and the gay palace where she was brought up, with its paradise of flowers, and aromas, and singing birds of gold and azure—­far away, far away.  And then that blood-written oath—­oh, so literally fulfilled and obeyed!  But the thought was evanescent from very fear.  Nor was his nervousness unjustified; for, even as he turned his head, he saw a figure wrapped up in a dark cloak, and surmounted by a white coil of pure linen, as he thought, emerging from the clump of thick trees that stood on the north end of the burying-ground.  The figure, having run as it were in fear so far forward, no sooner saw the projecting head of Aminadab, than it turned and retreated.  At the same instant Ady rose, as if disturbed, and ran to the house.  Yet the moaning did not cease.  It seemed interminable; or, if to be terminated by the absence of Ady, the sufferer did not know she was gone.  And oh, these wails!—­Aminadab fled and took them along with him, nor did they ever leave him.

Even when he went to bed they were fresh upon his ear, claiming precedence to the vision of his eye; though that, too, asserted its authority as something miraculous—­whether the Eastern mystery itself, or some tutelary genius brought from heaven by the shriek of man’s cruelty.  Nor could he rest for the thought that, humble as he was, he was surely taken there that he might go to the powers of earth to ask them to aid the powers of heaven.  Why, that Cradle had been built within the limits of civilisation.  Even the mason was known:  the bricks were not Egyptian bricks, nor the mortar foreign, nor the wood a tree from the heart of Africa; and yet, why was it there—­nay, why was the use of it not inquired into?  If Jeshurun had waxed fat and kicked against the Lord of heaven, was there no lord of earth that could tame this yellow-livered worshipper of Baal, who yet was received among the chiefs of Israel to drink the pure juice of the grape, and make a god of his belly, and to sing obscene songs?  Even in that house there was riot and debauchery upon the spoils of that woman, encaged like a beast, and at the world’s end from her natural protectors.

Yea, our good soul Aminadab became bold.  He was privileged, if not called.  But then that Brahma—­that incarnation of a power confessed by millions on millions of people possessed of souls, and therefore something in God’s reckonings!  It was no illusion.  Twice he had seen the mysterious being.  How did he come hither to the Ultima Thule, as it were, of the known world?  Why did he come just at a juncture when the daughter of a king of his own favoured people was immured in a dungeon, and calling for his help?  Because he must have known that a spark of the spirit that belonged to him, and would go back to him, was threatened to be extinguished by power in a land owing no obedience to him.  But didn’t that same moon shine on the children of Brahma as well as on the children of Christ? and were there no powers in