hard, irrevocable words.  Nay, she seemed to wish to distract my thoughts from the subject:  she rose from the floor:  “Hush!” she said, whisperingly; “after much weeping, Clara sleeps; we must not disturb her.”  She seated herself then on the same ottoman where I had left her in the morning resting on the beating heart of her Raymond; I dared not approach her, but sat at a distant corner, watching her starting and nervous gestures.  At length, in an abrupt manner she asked, “Where is he?”

“O, fear not,” she continued, “fear not that I should entertain hope!  Yet tell me, have you found him?  To have him once more in my arms, to see him, however changed, is all I desire.  Though Constantinople be heaped above him as a tomb, yet I must find him—­then cover us with the city’s weight, with a mountain piled above—­I care not, so that one grave hold Raymond and his Perdita.”  Then weeping, she clung to me:  “Take me to him,” she cried, “unkind Lionel, why do you keep me here?  Of myself I cannot find him —­but you know where he lies—­lead me thither.”

At first these agonizing plaints filled me with intolerable compassion.  But soon I endeavoured to extract patience for her from the ideas she suggested.  I related my adventures of the night, my endeavours to find our lost one, and my disappointment.  Turning her thoughts this way, I gave them an object which rescued them from insanity.  With apparent calmness she discussed with me the probable spot where he might be found, and planned the means we should use for that purpose.  Then hearing of my fatigue and abstinence, she herself brought me food.  I seized the favourable moment, and endeavoured to awaken in her something beyond the killing torpor of grief.  As I spoke, my subject carried me away; deep admiration; grief, the offspring of truest affection, the overflowing of a heart bursting with sympathy for all that had been great and sublime in the career of my friend, inspired me as I poured forth the praises of Raymond.

“Alas, for us,” I cried, “who have lost this latest honour of the world!  Beloved Raymond!  He is gone to the nations of the dead; he has become one of those, who render the dark abode of the obscure grave illustrious by dwelling there.  He has journied on the road that leads to it, and joined the mighty of soul who went before him.  When the world was in its infancy death must have been terrible, and man left his friends and kindred to dwell, a solitary stranger, in an unknown country.  But now, he who dies finds many companions gone before to prepare for his reception.  The great of past ages people it, the exalted hero of our own days is counted among its inhabitants, while life becomes doubly ‘the desart and the solitude.’