my reveries, which must gradually have ended in slumber.  I saw a man approaching towards me, whom, at first, I took for my janissary, but as he came nearer I found a very different figure.  He was a very old man with a beard as white as snow; his countenance was dark but paler than that of an Arab, and his features stern, wild, and with a peculiar savage expression; his form was gigantic, but his arms were withered and there was a large scar on the left side of his face which seemed to have deprived him of an eye.  He wore a black turban and black flowing robes, and there was a large chain round his waist which clanked as he moved.  It occurred to me that he was one of the santons or sacred madmen so common in the East, and I retired as he approached towards me.  He called out:  “Fly not, stranger; fear me not, I will not harm you.  You shall hear my story, it may be useful to you.”  He spoke in Arabic but in a peculiar dialect and to me new, yet I understood every word.  “You see before you,” he said, “a man who was educated a Christian, but who renounced the worship of the one supreme God for the superstitions of the pagans.  I became an apostate in the reign of the Emperor Julian, and I was employed by that Sovereign to superintend the re-erection of the temple of Jerusalem, by which it was intended to belie the prophecies and give the deathblow to the holy religion.  History has informed you of the result:  my assistants were most of them destroyed in a tremendous storm, I was blasted by lightning from heaven (he raised his withered hand to his face and eye), but suffered to live and expiate my crime in the flesh.  My life has been spent in constant and severe penance, and in that suffering of the spirit produced by guilt, and is to be continued as long as any part of the temple of Jupiter, in which I renounced my faith, remains in this place.  I have lived through fifteen tedious centuries, but I trust in the mercies of Omnipotence, and I hope my atonement is completed.  I now stand in the dust of the pagan temple.  You have just thrown the last fragment of it over the rock.  My time is arrived, I come!” As he spake the last words, he rushed towards the sea, threw himself from the rock and disappeared.  I heard no struggling, and saw nothing but a gleam of light from the wave that closed above him.  I was now roused by the cries of my servant and of the janissary, who were shaking my arm, and who informed me that my sleep was so sound that they were alarmed for me.  When I looked on the sea, there was the same light, and I seemed to see the very spot in the wave where the old man had sunk.  I was so struck by the vision, that I asked if they had not seen something dash into the wave, and if they had not heard somebody speaking to me as they arrived.  Of course their answers were negative.  In passing through Jerusalem and in coasting the Dead Sea I had been exceedingly struck by the present state of Judaea and the conformity