from Spain!--this is all a vision of your imagination.”--“Is it a dream that I see you now?” said Isidora--“is it a dream that I talk with you?--Tell me, for my senses are bewildered; and it appears to me no less strange, that you should be here in Spain, than that I should be in my native island. Alas! in the life that I now lead, dreams have become realities, and realities seem only like dreams. How is it you are here, if indeed you are here?--how is it that you have wandered so far to see me? How many oceans you must have crossed, how many isles you must have seen, and none like that where I first beheld you! But is it you indeed I behold? I thought I saw you last night, but I had rather trust even my dreams than my senses. I believed you only a visitor of that isle of visions, and a haunter of the visions that recall it--but are you in truth a living being, and one whom I may hope to behold in this land of cold realities and Christian horrors?”--“Beautiful Immalee, or Isidora, or whatever other name your Indian worshippers, or Christian god-fathers and god-mothers, have called you by, I pray you listen to me, while I expound a few mysteries to you.” And Melmoth, as he spoke, flung himself on a bed of hyacinths and tulips that displayed their glowing flowers, and sent up their odorous breath right under Isidora’s casement. “Oh you will destroy my flowers!” cried she, while a reminiscence of her former picturesque existence, when flowers were the companions alike of her imagination and her pure heart, awoke her exclamation. “It is my vocation--I pray you pardon me!” said Melmoth, as he basked on the crushed flowers, and darted his withering sneer and scowling glance at Isidora. “I am commissioned to trample on and bruise every flower in the natural and moral world--hyacinths, hearts, and bagatelles of that kind, just as they occur. And now, Donna Isidora, with as long an _et cetera_ as you or your sponsors could wish, and with no possible offence to the herald, here I am to-night--and where I shall be to-morrow night, depends on your choice. I would as soon be on the Indian seas, where your dreams send me rowing every night, or crashing through the ice near the Poles, or ploughing with my naked corse, (if corses have feeling), through the billows of that ocean where I must one day (a day that has neither sun or moon, neither commencement or termination), plough forever, and reap despair!”--“Hush!--hush!--Oh forbear such horrid sounds! Are you indeed he whom I saw in the isle? Are you he, inwoven ever since that moment with my prayers, my hopes, my heart? Are you that being upon whom hope subsisted, when life itself was failing? On my passage to this Christian land, I suffered much. I was so ill you would have pitied me--the clothes they put on me--the language they made me speak--the religion they made me believe--the country they brought me to--Oh _you_!--you alone!--the thought--the