The dews fell heavily, and a thin silvery mist began to rise and invest every object with an ashy tint, as the moon gradually faded in its far descent behind the distant hills. The grey dawn at length broke slowly over the plain, but was not perceptible to the traveller’s eye until the valleys were flooded with the young dewy light. The mist had thickened. The leaves of the trees dripped with their liquid burthen, and every spot that was not protected by a mantle of thick foliage, presented a bloom of moisture from the atmosphere, that seemed tinted with hues from fairy-land. Each blade of grass curved under its watery load, bending its delicate neck as if proud to bear the pure deposit of the skies. Everything was clothed in the same soft drapery, which was shaken off by the morning breeze, when each object resumed its natural variety of hue, and harmonious conformity of light and shadow. The traveller gathered together the leaves on which he had slept, kindled them, and taking a small cocoanut hookah from his wallet, smoked his chillam; then, making a scanty meal from the cold rice, refreshed himself with a draught of the dews which he had allowed to drip during the night into a plantain leaf doubled up in the form of a cup. Although his repast was a spare one, it was taken with a pure relish, and having once more strapped his few articles of baggage upon his shoulders, he prepared to resume his journey; but first turning his face towards the holy city, he offered up his devotions with pious fervour, and supplicated the protection of Heaven through his wanderings. As he pursued his solitary way through paths to which he was a perfect stranger, he could not help recalling the vision which had haunted his sleep. It had come so vividly before him that he more than half persuaded himself it must have been intended to be a direct revelation from Heaven, and yet, that a man without a name, without a home, a stranger in the land, should become the monarch of a powerful empire, seemed one of those impossibilities only to be dreamed of, but never realised. To his calmer reflections, the night-vision appeared nothing more than the lively operation of a fancy excited by sleep, and which had been rendered the more keenly alive to impressions from certain peculiar coincidences of events that had deeply interested him, and from those reflex images presented in slumber in consequence of the strong feelings which those coincidences had awakened within him. Nevertheless, in spite of the apparent unreasonableness of the thing promised, the utter improbability of such an event taking place, and the force of his arguments upon the folly of harbouring such a thought, he could not expel from his mind the singular revelation of that night. CHAPTER II.