Though clothed in language of my own, the maiden’s story is in substance the same as she related.  Yet were not these things narrated as past events; she merely recounted them as impressions of her childhood, and of her destiny yet unaccomplished.  And mystical as the tale most assuredly was, my knowledge of the strange arts of the island priesthood, and the rapt fancies indulged in by many of their victims, deprived it in good part of the effect it otherwise would have produced.

For ulterior purposes connected with their sacerdotal supremacy, the priests of these climes oftentimes secrete mere infants in their temples; and jealously secluding them from all intercourse with the world, craftily delude them, as they grow up, into the wildest conceits.

Thus wrought upon, their pupils almost lose their humanity in the constant indulgence of seraphic imaginings.  In many cases becoming inspired as oracles; and as such, they are sometimes resorted to by devotees; always screened from view, however, in the recesses of the temples.  But in every instance, their end is certain.  Beguiled with some fairy tale about revisiting the islands of Paradise, they are led to the secret sacrifice, and perish unknown to their kindred.

But, would that all this had been hidden from me at the time.  For Yillah was lovely enough to be really divine; and so I might have been tranced into a belief of her mystical legends.

But with what passionate exultation did I find myself the deliverer of this beautiful maiden; who, thinking no harm, and rapt in a dream, was being borne to her fate on the coast of Tedaidee.  Nor now, for a moment, did the death of Aleema her guardian seem to hang heavy upon my heart.  I rejoiced that I had sent him to his gods; that in place of the sea moss growing over sweet Yillah drowned in the sea, the vile priest himself had sunk to the bottom.

But though he had sunk in the deep, his ghost sunk not in the deep waters of my soul.  However in exultations its surface foamed up, at bottom guilt brooded.  Sifted out, my motives to this enterprise justified not the mad deed, which, in a moment of rage, I had done:  though, those motives had been covered with a gracious pretense; concealing myself from myself.  But I beat down the thought.

In relating her story, the maiden frequently interrupted it with questions concerning myself:—­Whence I came:  being white, from Oroolia?  Whither I was going:  to Amma?  And what had happened to Aleema?  For she had been dismayed at the fray, though knowing not what it could mean; and she had heard the priest’s name called upon in lamentations.  These questions for the time I endeavored to evade; only inducing her to fancy me some gentle demigod, that had come over the sea from her own fabulous Oroolia.  And all this she must verily have believed.  For whom, like me, ere this could she have beheld?  Still fixed she her eyes upon me strangely, and hung upon the accents of my voice.