draught of water. Neither of his companions had the power to speak. He sat down in a posture of heavy musing, and neither ventured to interrupt him. (17) Vide the original play, of which there is a curious and very obsolete translation. They kept silence till the morning was dawning, and a faint light streamed through the closed shutters. Then the Wanderer raised his heavy eyes, and fixed them on Melmoth. “Your ancestor has come home,” he said; “his wanderings are over!--What has been told or believed of me is now of light avail to me. The secret of my destiny rests with myself. If all that fear has invented, and credulity believed of me be true, to what does it amount? That if my crimes have exceeded those of mortality, so will my punishment. I have been on earth a terror, but not an evil to its inhabitants. None can participate in my destiny but with his own consent--_none have consented_--none can be involved in its tremendous penalties, but by participation. I alone must sustain the penalty. If I have put forth my hand, and eaten of the fruit of the interdicted tree, am I not driven from the presence of God and the region of paradise, and sent to wander amid worlds of barrenness and curse for ever and ever? “It has been reported of me, that I obtained from the enemy of souls a range of existence beyond the period allotted to mortality--a power to pass over space without disturbance or delay, and visit remote regions with the swiftness of thought--to encounter tempests without the _hope_ of their blasting me, and penetrate into dungeons, whose bolts were as flax and tow at my touch. It has been said that this power was accorded to me, that I might be enabled to tempt wretches in their fearful hour of extremity, with the promise of deliverance and immunity, on condition of their exchanging situations with me. If this be true, it bears attestation to a truth uttered by the lips of one I may not name, and echoed by every human heart in the habitable world. “No one has ever exchanged destinies with Melmoth the Wanderer. _I have traversed the world in the search, and no one, to gain that world, would lose his own soul!_--Not Stanton in his cell--nor you, Monçada, in the prison of the Inquisition--nor Walberg, who saw his children perishing with want--nor--another”--