While these thoughts dwell like gloomy night on the heart of Fabiola, her slave is enjoying the vision of light, clothed in mortal form, translucid and radiant, rising from the grave as from an alembic, in which have remained the grosser qualities of matter, without impairing the essence of its nature. Spiritualized and free, lovely and glorious, it springs from the very hot-bed of corruption. And another and another, from land and sea; from reeking cemetery, and from beneath consecrated altar; from the tangled thicket where solitary murder has been committed on the just, and from fields of ancient battle done by Israel for God; like crystal fountains springing into the air, like brilliant signal-lights, darted from earth to heaven, till a host of millions, side by side, repeoples creation with joyous and undying life. And how knows she this? Because One, greater and better than poet, sage, or sophist, had made the trial; had descended first into the dark couch of death, had blessed it, as He had done the cradle, and made infancy sacred; rendering also death a holy thing, and its place a sanctuary. He went into it in the darkest of evening, and He came forth from it in the brightest of morning; He was laid there wrapped in spices, and he rose again robed in His own fragrant incorruption. And from that day the grave had ceased to be an object of dread to the Christian soul, for it continued what he had made it,--the furrow into which the seed of immortality must needs be cast. The time was not come for speaking of these things to Fabiola. She mourned still, as they must mourn who have no hope. Day succeeded day in gloomy meditation on the mystery of death, till other cares mercifully roused her. The corpse arrived, and such a funeral followed as Rome then seldom witnessed. Processions by torch-light, in which the waxen effigies of ancestors were borne, and a huge funeral pile, built up of aromatic wood, and scented by the richest spices of Arabia, ended in her gathering up a few handfuls of charred bones, which were deposited in an alabaster urn, and placed in a niche of the family sepulchre, with the name inscribed of their former owner.