The native physician by whom he was attended ordered him decoctions, prepared from some lenitive herbs; these had not the slightest effect upon his disorder. When this arrived at a certain height, and the medical visitor saw that all material remedies were useless, he impressed upon the wife the necessity of immediately repairing to the temple of Somnat, and supplicating the divine intercession of its idol, promising her that her husband’s health would certainly be re-established, if she could only prevail upon the stone divinity to listen to her supplications. “All that art can do,” said he, “I have done to restore this unhappy man, who must soon yield up his spirit to be the inhabitant of another body, unless the deity of our temple raise him up at the intercession of a pious heart. Go, and may your prayer be heard!” This was no very encouraging expectation. The unhappy young creature now felt assured that her husband could not live, unless restored by superhuman means. The creed in which she had been reared taught her to trust in the efficacy of such means, and to believe that they would be accorded to a pious solicitation; she was therefore determined to offer her supplications in the temple, in the hope of averting her husband’s death, which, in fact, would involve her own. At this moment a Brahmin, and one of the officiating priests of the sanctuary, entered the sick man’s apartment. He was a sanctified man, with a gross, misshapen body, gross from indolence and indulgence, and bearing about him the unequivocal marks of the coarse bloated Sybarite. His shorn scalp bore not indeed the frost of age, but the deep corrugations by which the forehead was crossed showed, in characters too legible to need interpretation, that time had already prepared the furrows for the seeds of death. The old man’s countenance was haggard, though placid; but it was placid rather from insensibility, than from the access of elevated feeling. The eye was sunk beneath a projecting brow, that hid much of its expression, and its faded lustre spoke not that mute language of passion which his heart frequently prompted, but which the eye was too lustreless to betray. His legs were shrunk to the bones, and seemed scarcely able to bear the burthen of obesity which laziness and indulgence had imposed upon them. He hobbled to the couch of the dying man, looked at him for a moment, doubled his legs under him as he seated himself upon the floor, desired the cocoa-nut hookah to be brought, and, having inhaled the sedative luxury for a few moments, said, with an air of the utmost unconcern, “Thy soul is about to assume a new body; what are thy hopes?” The invalid said faintly--“I have not lived an unholy life, and therefore hope that I shall be advanced one step towards absorption[1] into Bhrim, when my spirit throws off the vile crust by which it has been encumbered here.” “Then you are prepared for the change--you are tired of this world?”