“After hours of work, I was brought back to life,--but a life worse than death. The Captain told Father Paolo that my mind was a blank, I could remember nothing of my past, I did not know my name. Then temptation came to Captain Vando. He took from me my belt, in which I had some English gold, a few English bank-notes, and the five bills of exchange, each for a thousand pounds. The latter he did not dare to dispose of, but the money he appropriated to his own use. He soon found I could be of no use to him on ship-board, so, on his arrival at Palermo, he sold me to a rich planter, for a hundred lire, and I was put to work in the orange groves. “Captain Vando in his confession told Father Paolo that he still had my belt containing the bills of exchange, and before his death he delivered these over to the priest. After the Captain's death, Father Paolo went to Signor Matrosa, who, when confronted with the facts, admitted I had been sold to him, and that I was known under the name of Alessandro Nondra, but he told him that I had been mixed up in a fight, and had received such a bad wound that I had been sent to the hospital. One of his managers, an Italian, had married an English girl, and they had a daughter with light hair, and blue eyes. It seems I had been sent to his house one day with a message, and when I saw his daughter, I cried out, 'Alice, Alice,' and caught the girl in my arms. Her father was so enraged that he picked up a gun lying near at hand, and gave me such a terrific blow on the head that I was knocked senseless. I remember nothing of it, but mistaking Anita for you was, undoubtedly, my first approach to my former consciousness. That scene was probably the one which you saw in your dream, Alice, and to think that afterwards you should be so near me in Palermo, and neither of us know it! “At the hospital the doctors found that the blow on my head had caused but a comparatively unimportant scalp wound, but, in dressing it, they found that at some earlier time my skull had been crushed. They performed the delicate operation of trepanning the skull, and when I came out from the effects of the ether, my mind was in the same state as it had been twenty-three years before. “After that my recovery was rapid. Father Paolo made Signor Matrosa pay me thirty-three hundred lire as my wages for the many years I had worked for him, and I gave a thousand of it to the manager's daughter, to whom, in a way, I owed my return to my natural self. The rest I gave to Father Paolo for the use of his church.