should be to collect the most swift and deadly of the lightnings that are hissing around us, and transfix you where you stand!”--“Me?” repeated the trembling Indian, her cheek growing paler at his words, and the voice in which they were uttered, than at the redoubling fury of the storm, amid whose pauses she scarce heard them.--“Yes--you--you--lovely as you are, and innocent, and pure, before a fire more deadly consumes your existence, and drinks your heart-blood--before you are longer exposed to a danger a thousand times more fatal than those with which the elements menace you--the danger of my accursed and miserable presence!” “Immalee, unconscious of his meaning, but trembling with impassioned grief at the agitation with which he spoke, approached him to soothe the emotion of which she knew neither the name or the cause. Through the fractures of the ruin the red and ragged lightnings disclosed, from time to time, a glimpse of her figure,--her dishevelled hair,--her pallid and appealing look,--her locked hands, and the imploring bend of her slight form, as if she was asking pardon for a crime of which she was unconscious,--and soliciting an interest in griefs not her own. All around her wild, unearthly, and terrible,--the floor strewed with fragments of stone, and mounds of sand,--the vast masses of ruined architecture, whose formation seemed the work of no human hand, and whose destruction appeared the sport of demons,--the yawning fissures of the arched and ponderous roof, through which heaven darkened and blazed alternately with a gloom that wrapt every thing, or a light more fearful than that gloom.--All around her gave to her form, when it was momently visible, a relief so strong and so touching, that it might have immortalized the hand who had sketched her as the embodied presence of an angel who had descended to the regions of woe and wrath,--of darkness and of fire, on a message of reconciliation,--and descended in vain.