In the tranquillity of evening, when Gaspar was laid on his narrow pallet, and their minds equally exhausted by agitating conversation, Sebastian would take his flute and play Portuguese airs, till Africa was forgotten, and their native country alone remembered.--It was in these moments that love reigned absolute over the heart of the young King; he could not breathe a note that did not recal some song of Donna Gonsalva’s; her celestial voice seemed floating around him, till tenderness melted him into weakness, or impatience lashed him into agony, and the instrument would then fall from his hand. Experience alone teaches us the mutability of fortune: we hear of it, we see it, we think we understand and believe it,--but when we find _ourselves_ precipitated from an height of happiness into an abyss of misery, it is then for the first time that we really discover the slightness of our former perceptions.--The adversity of others “we write in sand;” our own “we engrave on brass.” Sebastian had now constant opportunities of making this reflection, for until his dismal change, absolute power had prevented him from even dreaming of a reverse in his own person: since that reverse had happened, he bitterly lamented his precipitate promise to the pope, whose sanction might otherwise have been obtained, and then Gonsalva would have been left at least a queen, protected by wealth and authority. But these regrets could not recal the past; they were useful only as lessons for the future:--he averted his mind from such reflections, directing all its energies, towards the present objects of his care. Some of these were attained: his fellow-slaves of the garden were comparatively happy through his means; Hafiz continued to shew him increasing regard; and Gaspar was losing most of those alarming symptoms which so lately threatened his life.--Though in slavery, and condemned to perpetual labour, the young monarch had never yet smarted under one degrading indignity which he would hereafter blush to have survived: this was a consolation almost transporting; it assured him of divine protection, he thought, seeming to say, that Providence might bend but would not crush him. As it was from Kara Aziek that Sebastian anticipated the completion of every hope, he was naturally inquisitive about her character and habits of life: by his facility of acquiring languages (the most enviable because the most useful of talents,) he was now competent to converse with Hafiz in excellent Moresco; he therefore seized an opportunity one day when they were alone together inspecting her nursery of exotics, and questioned him respecting their gentle mistress.