your father, though he has never yet beheld you, would buy with his last ducat the faggots that were to consume you to ashes; and all your relations in their gala robes would shout their hallelujahs to your dying screams of torture. Do you know that the Christianity of these countries is diametrically opposite to the Christianity of that world of which you caught a gleam, and which you may see recorded in the pages of your Bible, if you are permitted to read it?” “Isidora wept, and confessed she had not found Christianity what she had at first believed it; but with her wild and eccentric ingenuousness, she accused herself the next moment of her confession,--and she added, “I am so ignorant in this new world,--I have so much to learn,--my senses so often deceive me,--and my habits and perceptions so different from what they ought to be--I mean from what those around me are--that I should not speak or think but as I am taught. Perhaps, after some years of instruction and suffering, I may be able to discover that happiness cannot exist in this new world, and Christianity is not so remote from Catholicism as it appears to me now.”--“And have you not found yourself happy in this new world of intelligence and luxury?” said Melmoth, in a tone of involuntary softness. “I have at times.”--“What times?”--“When the weary day was over, and my dreams bore me back to that island of enchantment. Sleep is to me like some bark rowed by visionary pilots, that wafts me to shores of beauty and blessedness,--and all night long I revel in my dreams with spirits. Again I live among flowers and odours--a thousand voices sing to me from the brooks and the breezes--the air is all alive and eloquent with invisible melodists--I walk amid a breathing atmosphere, and living and loving inanimation--blossoms that shed themselves beneath my steps--and streams that tremble to kiss my feet, and then retire; and then return again, wasting themselves in fondness before me, and touching me, as my lips press the holy images they have taught me to worship here!”--“Does no other image ever visit your dreams, Immalee?”--“I need not tell you,” said Isidora, with that singular mixture of natural firmness, and partial obscuration of intellect,--the combined result of her original and native character, and extraordinary circumstances of her early existence--“I need not tell you--you know you are with me every night!”--“Me?”--“Yes, you; you are for ever in that canoe that bears me to the Indian isle--you gaze on me, but your expression is so changed, that I dare not speak to you--we fly over the seas in a moment, but you are for ever at the helm, though you never land--the moment the paradise isle appears, you disappear; and as we return, the ocean is all dark, and our course is as dark and swift as the storm that sweeps them--you look at me, but never speak--Oh yes! you are with me every night!”--“But, Immalee, these are all dreams--idle dreams. _I_ row you over the Indian seas