He caught at the form as he spoke, but there was no resistance to his grasp. On looking again towards the spot it had ceased to be visible. The storm within him arose once more; he rushed into the kitchen, where the fire blazed out with fiercer heat; again he imagined that the thunder came to his ears, but the thunderings which he heard were only the voice of conscience. Again his own footsteps and his voice sounded in his fancy as the footsteps and voices of fiends, with which his imagination peopled the room. His state and his existence seemed to him a confused and troubled dream; he tore his hair--threw it on the table--and immediately started back with a hollow groan; for his locks, which but a few hours before had been as black as a raven's wing, were now white as snow! On discovering this, he gave a low but frantic laugh. “Ha, ha, ha!” he exclaimed; “here is another mark--here is food for despair. Silently, but surely, did the hand of God work this, as proof that I am hopeless! But I will bear it; I will bear the sight! I now feel myself a man blasted by the eye of God Himself! Ha, ha, ha! Food for despair! Food for despair!” Immediately he passed into his own room, and approaching the looking-glass beheld a sight calculated to move a statue. His hair had become literally white, but the shades of his dark complexion, now distorted by terror and madness, flitted, as his features worked under the influence of his tremendous passions, into an expression so frightful, that deep fear came over himself. He snatched one of his razors, and fled from the glass to the kitchen. He looked upon the fire, and saw the white ashes lying around its edge. “Ha!” said he, “the light is come! I see the sign. I am directed, and I will follow it. There is yet one hope. The immolation! I shall be saved, yet so as by fire. It is for this my hair has become white;--the sublime warning for my self-sacrifice! The color of ashes!--white--white! It is so! I will sacrifice my body in material fire, to save my soul from that which is eternal! But I had anticipated the sign. The self-sacrifice is accepted!”* * As the reader may be disposed to consider the nature of the priest's death an unjustifiable stretch of fiction, I have only to say in reply, that it is no fiction at all. It is not, I believe, more than forty, or perhaps fifty, years since a priest committed his body to the flames, for the purpose of saving his soul by an incrematory sacrifice. The object of the suicide being founded on the superstitious belief, that a priest guilty of great crimes possesses the privilege of securing salvation by self-sacrifice. We have heard two or three legends among the people in which this principle predominated. The outline of one of these, called “The Young Priest and Brian Braar,” was as follows:--