on earth, rigid, uncaring. If but I could have died with her there! Alas, the life in me was too puissant to yield, the nerves too tough to break! The passion came on me to hurl myself into her grave as the clods fell. It was but an insensate impulse. I made no cry or sign till I got into the lonely chamber; and there God alone knows how I survived my hurricane of grief and desolation. Nor could years ever root out the sorrow. There in Limanora, with an abyss between me and my past, and a noble new life around me, I worked and wept. The wound had opened afresh. Was I never to commune with that loving loved spirit again? There was a touch on my hand, and the magnetism of sympathy and consolation flowed through my system. It was Thyriel. She had felt my deep grief, though then at a great distance from me, and without noise or speech she had come to my side. So absorbed had I been in my past and my sorrow that I knew not her presence till her magnetic touch awakened me from my dream. She had realised in a moment whither my thoughts had gone, and reverenced the holy past. Then, when the mood was growing despotic and paralysing the soul, she stepped into the startled silence. I was myself again, and swept the unmanly tears away. Yet I could not drive the sadness of farewell out of my system. Here was this sage, who had so often counselled me and guided my faltering footsteps, about to vanish for ever from the scene of his triumphs. Oblivion would sweep his memory and his work into the abyss. We would see him no more; no more hear his grave wise sayings, weighted with the experience of centuries. All his gathered knowledge and skill would lapse; and our civilisation would be the poorer. Up the steep of progress it would have to climb, weaker for the absence of this strong arm, this much-exercised and full brain and heart.