brass caldron.  But expensive and rare as were these relics of bygone dynasties and mouldering epochs, there was one other object for which the master would have given everything else in this museum of curiosities, and the secret of which no eyes but his own had yet explored.  On a sculptured slab, that once formed a portion of the architrave of the Cave Temple at Elephanta, was a splendid marble miniature, four feet high, of that miracle of Saracenic architecture, the Taj Mahal at Agra.  The elaborate carving resembled lacework, and the beauty of the airy dome and slender, glittering minarets of this mimic tomb of Noor-Mahal could find no parallel, save in the superb and matchless original.  The richly-carved door that closed the arch of the tomb swung back on golden hinges, and opened only by a curiously-shaped golden key, which never left Mr. Murray’s watch-chain; consequently what filled the penetralia was left for the conjecture of the imaginative; and when his mother expressed a desire to examine it, he merely frowned and said hastily: 

“That is Pandora’s box, minus imprisoned hope.  I prefer it should not be opened.”

Immediately in front of the tomb he had posted a grim sentinel—­a black marble statuette of Mors, modeled from that hideous little brass figure which Spence saw at Florence, representing a skeleton sitting on the ground, resting one arm on an urn.

Filled though it was with sparkling bijouterie that would have graced the Barberini or Strozzi cabinets, the glitter of the room was cold and cheerless.  No light, childish feet had ever pattered down the long rows of shining tiles; no gushing, mirthful laughter had ever echoed through those lofty windows; everything pointed to the past—­a classic, storied past, but dead as the mummies of Karnac, and treacherously, repulsively lustrous as the waves that break in silver circles over the buried battlements, and rustling palms and defiled altars of the proud cities of the plain.  No rosy memories of early, happy manhood lingered here; no dewy gleam of the merry morning of life, when hope painted and peopled a smiling world; no magic trifles that prattled of the springtime of a heart, that in wandering to and fro through the earth, had fed itself with dust and ashes, acrid and bitter; had studiously collected only the melancholy symbols of mouldering ruin, desolation, and death, and which found its best type in the Taj Mahal, that glistened so mockingly as the gas-light flickered over it.

A stranger looking upon St. Elmo Murray for the first time, as he paced the floor, would have found it difficult to realize that only thirty-four years had plowed those deep, rugged lines in his swarthy and colorless but still handsome face; where midnight orgies and habitual excesses had left their unmistakable plague-spot, and Mephistopheles had stamped his signet.  Blase, cynical, scoffing, and hopeless, he had stranded his life, and was recklessly striding to his grave, trampling