“We were listening to the sound of the tempest, when all of a sudden I felt one of Atala’s tears fall upon my breast. ‘Storm of the heart,’ I cried to myself, ‘is it a drop of your rain?’ Then embracing her I loved, I said, ‘Atala, you are concealing something from me. Open your heart to me, O beauty! It does one so much good when a friend looks into one’s soul. Tell me this secret of grief which you persist in hiding from me. Ah! I see you are weeping for your country.’ She immediately retorted, ‘Child of men, why should I weep for my country, since my father came not from the land of palms?’--‘What!’ I replied, with profound astonishment, ‘your father was not from the land of palms! What was he then who brought you upon this earth? Reply!’ Atala answered in these words: “‘Before my mother brought to the warrior Simaghan, as a marriage portion, thirty mares, twenty buffaloes, a hundred measures of nut-oil, fifty beaver-skins, and a quantity of other riches, she had known a man of white flesh. Now the mother of my mother threw water in her face, and forced her to marry the magnanimous Simaghan, who was like unto a king, and honored by the people as a genius. But my mother said to her new spouse, “My bosom has conceived; kill me.” Simaghan replied to her, “May the Great Spirit preserve me from such an action! I will not mutilate you. I will neither cut off your nose nor your ears, because you have been sincere and have not betrayed my couch. The fruit of your bosom shall be my fruit, and I will not visit you till after the departure of the bird of the rice-fields, when the thirteenth moon shall have shone.” About that time I issued from my mother’s bosom, and I began to grow, proud as a Spaniard and as a savage. My mother made me a Christian, so that her God and the God of my father might also be my God. Afterwards love-sickness fell upon her, and she went down into the little pit furnished with skins, from which no one ever comes out.’ “Such was Atala’s story. ‘And who was your father, then, poor orphan?’ I said to her; ‘how was he called by men upon earth, and what name did he bear among the genii?’--‘I never washed my father’s feet,’ said Atala: ‘I only know that he lived with his sister at Saint Augustine, and that he ever remained faithful to my mother. Philip was his name amongst the angels, and men called him Lopez.” “At these words I uttered a cry which re-echoed throughout the solitude; the soumis of my transports mingled with those of the storm. Pressing Atala to my heart, I exclaimed with sobs, ‘O my sister! O daughter of Lopez! daughter of my benefactor!’ Atala, alarmed, sought to ascertain the cause of my agitation; but when she learnt that Lopez was the generous host who had adopted me at Saint Augustine, and whom I had quitted in order to be free, she was herself stricken with joy and confusion.