“The stranger approached, and the beautiful vision approached also, but not like an European female with low and graceful bendings, still less like an Indian girl with her low salams, but like a young fawn, all animation, timidity, confidence, and cowardice, expressed in almost a single action. She sprung from the sands--ran to her favourite tree;--returned again with her guard of peacocks, who expanded their superb trains with a kind of instinctive motion, as if they felt the danger that menaced their protectress, and, clapping her hands with exultation, seemed to invite them to share in the delight she felt in gazing at the _new flower that had grown in the sand_. “The stranger advanced, and, to Immalee’s utter astonishment, addressed her in the language which she herself had retained some words of since her infancy, and had endeavoured in vain to make her peacocks, parrots, and loxias, answer her in corresponding sounds. But her language, from want of practice, had become so limited, that she was delighted to hear its most unmeaning sounds uttered by human lips; and when he said, according to the form of the times, “How do you, fair maid?” she answered, “God made me,” from the words of the Christian Catechism that had been breathed into her infant lip. “God never made a fairer creature,” replied the stranger, grasping her hand, and fixing on her eyes that still burn in the sockets of that arch-deceiver. “Oh yes!” answered Immalee, “he made many things more beautiful. The rose is redder than I am--the palm-tree is taller than I am--and the wave is bluer than I am;--but they all change, and I never change. I have grown taller and stronger, though the rose fades every six moons; and the rock splits to let in the bats, when the earth shakes; and the waves fight in their anger till they turn grey, and far different from the beautiful colour they have when the moon comes dancing on them, and sending all the young, broken branches of her light to kiss my feet, as I stand on the soft sand. I have tried to gather them every night, but they all broke in my hand the moment I dipt it into water.”--“And have you fared better with the stars?” said the stranger smiling.--“No,” answered the innocent being, “the stars are the flowers of heaven, and the rays of the moon the boughs and branches; but though they are so bright, they only blossom in the night,--and I love better the flowers that I can gather, and twine in my hair. When I have been all night wooing a star, and it has listened and descended, springing downwards like a peacock from its nest, it has hid itself often afterwards playfully amid the mangoes and tamarinds where it fell; and though I have searched for it till the moon looked wan and weary of lighting me, I never could find it. But where do you come from?--you are not scaly and voiceless like those who grow in the waters, and show their strange shapes as I sit on the shore at sun-set;--nor are you red and diminutive like those who